An Old English Township

A magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and politics.

ONE of the interests of England, to those who care to look below the surface, is in the associations of ancient life and times which cling about it everywhere. There is not the poorest little country village or the most prosaic factory town but, if you will take the trouble to root up its records, touches incidents and changes of ownership and the fortunes of human life which carry you back with a curious interest along the centuries.

The very names of places and streets are often full of history. You come upon " Lazarus Lane.” Now it may be only a plain little street of long rows of cheap brick dwellings, but that name tells of a time, long centuries ago, when somewhere in the neighborhood stood the lazar-house, or leper - house, where the lepers of the little town were herded together, away from the other dwellings. Or here is a street called the “ Friary,” or " Blackfriars,” or some other kind of “friars,” — Gray, White, or what not; mere shops and houses now, but if you should search about in the old yards and entries, it is likely enough that here and there you would come upon some patch of dark stone walling, grimy with age, or perhaps a fragment of an old arch that long ago belonged to the monastery which surely stood there.

You have, indeed, to be upon your guard against mistakes in such local etymology, arising from the original name having been corrupted into something similar, and yet perhaps entirely differ-

ent in meaning. Thus the “ Deansgate” which you find in various north of England towns does not recall an old city gate by which the dean used to enter, or, as some would have it, by which the Danes made their attack. “Gate,” in the north of England, is simply " way,” and “ deans ” should properly be denes: ” the way along some old “dene” or “den,” — some deep valley or ravine which may be entirely filled up now, but which surely was once there.

Perhaps the best illustration of such a growth of false meaning on to an old name is one that I came across when I was busy over the revision of Baines’s History of Lancashire. I wanted to know whether there were any traces left of the old Roman road which once ran near to Wigan. Having written to a friend resident there to make inquiry, I received the astounding information that there certainly was one most interesting trace of the Roman occupation, inasmuch as a certain highway was still called, and had been from time immemorial, " Seneca Lane,” no doubt in memory of the celebrated philosopher. This was too much, however ; but it was only after a good deal of inquiry that I found the real explanation, which turned out to be that this was an old way to a certain " seven-acre ” or “ s’en-acre ” field.

Better, however, than any of these general illustrations of the interest which attaches to old names and places will be the study of some single township; and I will take for the purpose one of the least attractive that could well he found.

If there is a part of England which, to the casual traveler, gives the impression of specially prosaic life, it is Lancashire ; and if there is one part of Lancashire more flat and devoid of anything striking or picturesque than the rest, it is the stretch of level country called “the Fylde.” As you journey northward from Liverpool by the London and Northwestern, as soon as. you are past Preston you enter upon this “ Fylde ” (Saxon for field ”), reaching away to the westward of the track some fifteen miles or so to the sea. When you come to the sea, the long wastes of shore and sand dunes are relieved by several considerable watering-places, — Lytham, Blackpool, and Fleetwood, — but the intervening land is simply a great expanse of farmingcountry, originally peat-moss the most of it, and about as fertile and as devoid of visible interest as the rich corn-covered prairie lands of central Illinois. In the midst of this is the little country town of Kirkham, the ancient mother parish of the whole district; and three miles away is the township of the Singletons, — Great and Little Singleton, — the object of this study.

Singleton — it is only old local usage that has divided it in name — is quite a small township, covering about thirtyeight hundred acres, mainly scattered farms, with a hamlet in the part called “ Great Singleton,” and the whole population some three hundred, much the same as at the beginning of the century. There could hardly be a more unpromising spot either for the artist or the antiquarian. Very ordinary farms, among which the only notable ones are two a little more pretentious than the rest, with names, too, that indicate a former dignity, — Singleton Grange and Mains Hall; not a church, or residence, or grove of trees, or hill, or stream, that any one would travel ten miles to see. But what is lacking in visible monuments may possibly be supplied by impalpable memories and associations. Let us see.

Suppose we take as our starting-point, not to claim too much to begin with, the time of the Norman Conquest, eight hundred years ago. Domesday-book is to English topography what the roll of Battle Abbey is to genealogy; and Singleton can hold up its head with any place in the country, for here it is in Domesday-book, in the neat black script of the foreign ecclesiastics who copied out the notes of Norman William’s commissioners, who, in 1086, made their property-census of the north of England. It is not much that it tells us. There was not much left to tell by the time the Conqueror had stamped out the resistance of the north in blood and fire. But how much may be read between the lines in which " Singletun ” occurs in the list of sixty-one “ vills ” belonging to “ Prestun ” ! Every “ vill ” denoted separate habitation and inhabitants, more or fewer, in the previous Saxon times; but now, after enumerating these sixtyone vills, which virtually included this whole Fylde country, the record adds: “ Out of these, sixteen have a few inhabitants, but how many is unknown. The rest are waste.” It is easy to understand why “how many is unknown.” The poor terrified vassals and churls who had seen forty-five out of the sixtyone neighboring townships utterly wasted would be in no hurry to report themselves. Count Tostig, brother of the great Saxon Harold, had all this country in his wide earldom of Northumbria, and, having been deposed by his own thanes in their “ Gemot,” had joined the invading armies, and expected that William would, if victorious, replace him. But Tostig fell at the great battle of Stamford Bridge, just three weeks before the battle of Hastings; thus his claim was out of the way, and William gave all that north country to his great baron, Roger of Poictou. So, here, this little entry, “Singletun, vi car.” (six ploughlands), brings back to us how that great crisis of English history touched this small group of Saxon farms among the peats and mosses of the Fylde.

But we can look further hack yet. If you could have gone to those farmers, still in the old Saxon time, before the Conquest had eclipsed everything else, you would have found that the great epoch they had most in mind was the time of the Danish incursions. That was two hundred years before, but so great had been the terror of those fierce invaders, who had come, year after year, raiding the land, for all the world like war parties of the Sioux or Apaches, that everything old or obscure, or with any special sign of strength about it, was referred to the Danes ; so that one hard, solid roadway that ran northwards in the next township, very different from the muddy and often impassable trails through that soft Fylde country, was called the “ Danes’ Pad,” and it is called the Danes’ Pad still; for it may yet be traced here and there. Even after the wearing and wasting of these thousand years there is enough of the hard gravel and the great stones beneath traceable through the fields ; and to this day “ as hard as the Danes’ Pad ” is one of the common sayings of the country people thereabouts. These fossils which are preserved in language are as interesting as those imbedded in the rock.

Really that Danes’ Pad is a great deal older; full four centuries further hack still it dates. The Danes made no roads. It is, in reality, an old Roman way; not one of the great roads such as those which the Romans laid, straight as an arrow over hill and dale, from south to north. This was only one of the cross-roads from the great Roman fort near Preston to the port they had on the estuary of the Wyre, just north of Singleton. It was in the year 79, the same year that saw the destruction of Pompeii, that Agricola, charged to complete the conquest of Britain, marched northward with his legions, and, leavingforts and garrisons as he went, made the whole land a settled Roman province, whither, afterwards, came peaceful Roman citizens. For three hundred years the Romans held the land about as the English hold India now. Here and there, their mines and kilns, traces of country villas, or fragments of pillars that once adorned their temples may be found all along those northern roads; and out of the black peat soil of Singleton their coins and arms have often been turned up by spade and plough.

But even this is not the furthest back that we can go. If you should sit and talk with the old men and women of that district, they would tell you how, when they were young, Halloween, October 31, the evening before Allhallows, or All Saints’ Day, was commonly called ‘‘Teinla ” night, and that the “ Beltein fires ” were burned not only on the more distant hills, but in the townships of the Fylde itself. Hardly a township, according to the testimony of an old clergyman who knew every nook and corner of that Fylde country, But has its ancient Teinla pit, where ashes and calcined stones tell of these bonfires. The people do not know what they mean, nor what the “ Teinla ” or “ Beltein ” names for them mean. All their idea is that they used to be supposed to help souls out of purgatory ; and indeed a field near to Singleton was formerly called “ Purgatory,” from the association of these fires which were once celebrated in it. But in reality they are a relic of the ancient Britons, the Celtic race who were there before either Saxons or Romans, — a relic alike of their language and of their religion. In Welsh, “tân” is still “fire,” and “ Beltein ” is simply “ Bel - tân,” the ancient Bel or Baal fire ; and here were these Lancashire farmers, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, still lighting, on the same days and in the same places, the fires of the old idolworship that was in the times of the Druids, and it may be earlier, and using the very same word for them, — a word that carries us further back still, in ways that may not be traceable, yet can hardly be doubtful, to the Bels and Baals of Phœnicia and the East.

That is about as far back as we can go. Now let us return to our startingpoint of the Norman Conquest and the records of Domesday-book, and, from the centuries since, glean what facts or names there may be to throw any light of human interest on this little township of Singleton.

“ Roger of Poictou ” had “ Singleton,” says Domesday-book, six ploughlands, — some six or seven hundred acres that could be cultivated; the rest, moss, swamp, or forest. That turbulent baron, busy building his great castle at Lancaster, would not have much personal connection with these little scattered townships of his great fief. What he did was to parcel them out among the knights and warriors who had followed him from Normandy, each to hold under him ; and these smaller and remoter mesnes, or manors, would be given to the plain men-at-arms, who: thenceforth became known as William or John of such and such a place. Thus when, in a few generations, we find this manor in the hands of an “Alan de Singleton.” we know that the little township was allotted to some one of these plain men-atarms with no surname. To these scattered townships these new “ mesne ” or intermediate lords came. Half depopulated, the Saxon thanes especially having perished either at Hastings or Stamford Bridge, or been slaughtered in the subsequent uprisings, there would be plenty of vacant lands to seize, and in the best of these the new lord would settle down, with the right of the strong hand and the conquering race. We talk of the feudal system and its curious and picturesque tenures; but in the beginning, when William’s Norman soldiery first settled among the cowed, crushed churls in these remoter parts, the feudal system meant almost any right that strong and greedy or lustful men chose to claim over serfs who were as absolutely in their power as the slaves in some outlying Southern plantation were in the power of the overseer. How this tremendous power was actually used we have little direct evidence ; those serfs had no historians ! But when we come upon the first at all detailed notice of this Singleton manor, two hundred and eighty or ninety years afterward, we find the tenants of the twenty-one little parcels of land spoken of simply as “ bondsmen.” We find them not only having to pay rent, and also to render service with plough and harrow and scythe, but when a tenant died the lord claimed “ heriot,” which was the best horse or cow or other chattel on the little farm ; and when a tenant’s daughter married, “marehet,” the later commutation for the ancient “ maiden-rent,” the hideous jus 'primœ noctis. Yes, these fossil words in the old charters preserve some curious history. I am afraid there was only too much reason for a story my father used to tell of a plain-spoken old lady (the mother of one of our Lancashire worthies), who, being very deaf, used to make her son interpret to her. One day, in a room full of company, a new arrival in the district, a millionaire with a brand-new pedigree from Herald’s College, was expatiating on his ancestry, when the old lady broke in with her shrillest whisper to her son : “ What is he saying ? ” “ He is speaking of his ancestorshaving come over with the Conqueror.” Ah ! ” screamed the aged dame, shaking her head. “There was a deal of raff came over with that Conqueror ! ”

So we come down along those obscure centuries, just noted here and there by some brief mention in the Testa de Nevill or the quo warranto’s, showing how the manor passed from Singletons to Banastres, and later on to Stanleys and Heskeths, and so on. Dry as dust, indeed ! And yet here and there is something that lights up those old names and times with human interest.

For instance, for all the years from 1275 to 1330 there was going on a chronic strife between these Banastres, one of the strong, turbulent families of the north, and the prior and monks of St. Mary’s Priory at Lancaster. Just after the Conquest, Roger of Poictou, who had many reasons for wanting to be good neighbors with the monks in the vicinity of his new castle, granted to this St. Mary’s Priory of Lancaster the tithes of a whole posse of these dependent townships, Singleton among the rest. So, about the time when the first mesne lord came there to see what he could get out of his lands and tenants, thither also came a delegation of the monks to set up a “ grange,” or granary, where they could gather in these tithes, which were all, of course, iu kind. There is the origin of that division you might wonder at of the township into “ Great ” and " Little ” Singleton. Quite a number of those old Fylde townships are divided in the same way, arising from this fact of the monks setting up their “ grange ” and the lord setting up his “ hall ” (that is how the name Mains Hall comes) ; and it is an interesting comment on the times that the two are always at opposite ends of the manor ; for the monks were jealous of these co-grantees, and as for the men-at-arms, with their greeds and their lusts, they did not want any monks nearer than they could help. For though the monks were pretty keen after their tithes, they were, especially in those earlier times after the Conquest, the only power to whom the poor could look. Alas! it was not very much that they could look for to the monk or two who held that Singleton Grange which is still the chief farm of Great Singleton, as Mains Hall is the chief farm of Little

Singleton. For St. Mary’s Priory at Lancaster was one of the alien priories, all Normans or Italians ; whereas in the native monasteries, though Norman abbots and officers might be put over them, the rank and file of the monks were largely Saxons. But still, there was seldom much love lost between the grange and the hall; and when we find, in the registry of St. Mary’s Priory, that “ Sir Adam Banastre and six others,” among them “ Adam, the reeve,” — fie upon the sheriff for such illegal violence ! — had fallen upon the prior and his retinue at Poulton, just beyond Singleton, and cruelly beaten and wounded them, and finally had taken them off to “durance vile ” in his stronghold at Thornton, why, we conclude, first, that this Adam must have been a good deal of an agnostic ; and, second, that this was probably the outcome of a very long standing quarrel, as we know it was the prelude to half a century of litigation. How one would like to be able to look back upon that old time and learn all about it, as it would be told, with varying sympathies, in the rude huts of those “ bondsmen,” in their little patches of cleared land among the bog and forest, to whom, we may opine, if the monks stood in some sort as God, Sir Adam even more adequately represented the devil. The matter in dispute was this : that the only practicable way from the mother priory at Lancaster to the grange at Great Singleton was over Sir Adam’s lands in Little Singleton. All that we know besides is that for fiftyfive years after this rough usage of the prior the dispute went on, and not till 1330 was it settled by an indenture between a later Adam Banastre and a later prior, Adam Conrattes. In this indenture, there is first recited the existence of long dissensions between the contracting parties respecting the passage of the prior’s servants and “ carriages ” (“ carriages,” remember, in the modest ancient sense, as we read in the book of Acts, “We took up our carriages and went up to Jerusalem ”) across Sir Adam’s lands, and also “ much disturbance in the collection of the prior’s tithes;" and so finally the prior and the knight agree that the prior and his people shall have a sufficient road in both directions from Singleton Grange, — that is, both to the further priory lands, and back toward the priory itself, — in consideration of which the prior remits all claim to actions for trespass against Sir Adam and his servants. And we will hope they all lived happy ever afterwards !

Only one more of these curious glimpses into the old time. In most of these little commonplace villages of England, of which I have taken Singleton as a type, there is some interest about the church, if about nothing else, and Singleton is no exception. It is not much of a church that is there now, — it was even less in the old time, — but its very remoteness and insignificance have made its story, in one respect, I believe, unique. That respect is that, alone among the parishes of England, so far as I know, the Reformation never properly took effect there ; and after a period of curious indistinctness and uncertainty the church is found still in Roman Catholic hands, and remained so till the middle of last century.

The church in Singleton is first met with as a mere chantry, very possibly set up there by the monks in connection with their grange. All that we know is that in an old deed of 1358—59 the “ chapelle of Saint Marye in Syngleton ” is mentioned as being granted by the Duke of Lancaster to a certain “ John de Estwitton, hermit ; ” and at intervals during the next century we come upon the records of licenses granted for “ an oratory ” for the people of the township, — from which we infer that the priests of the mother church at Kirkham, some miles away, were unwilling to lose, by a permanent division, their hold upon any part of their great parish, which in those days covered about one hundred and thirty square miles. However, this St. Mary’s “chapelle” at Singleton seems to have become more or less of a settled institution ; and at the Reformation that great ecclesiastical change took effect here for the moment, as elsewhere, and in 1547 Edward VI.’s commissioners established “ a stipendarye in the chapelle of Syngloton in Kirkham,” with the not extravagant living of forty-nine shillings (about twelve dollars) a year, to be paid out of confiscated church estates. In 1552, however, came the reaction of Queen Mary’s reign ; all things fell back as near as could be into the old ways, and of course the neighboring families, most of whom in the Fylde remained loyal Catholics, restored the mass. Then follows the curious and perplexing part of the story, the fact of which, so far as I can gather, seems to have been that on the accession of Queen Elizabeth there was no clear change of service. Probably it would have been hard to tell whether it was the old church or the reformed. This was indeed the way in many churches of the remoter north ; everything was in chaos. We have one glimpse into that chaos at Singleton. In 1578, among the church presentments at York Cathedral, appears the following account of the curate of Singleton : “ There is not servyse done in due tyme. He kepeth no hous nor releveth the poore. He is not dyligent in visitinge the sycke. He doth not teach the catechisme. There is no sermons. He churcheth fornycatours without doinge any penaunce. He maketh a donge-hill of the chapel-yeard, and he hath lately kepte a typlinge-hous and a nowty woman in it.” Do not let any one be disturbed about this appearing to be a reflection, on this side or that, of those old times of religious struggle. The fact would seem to have been that, while he was certainly reported to the authorities at York as a conforming Protestant, York was practically as distant, in those days, as Boston is from any cross-roads schoolhouse in Nebraska, and on the spot there at Singleton he passed for a Catholic priest. The record indeed indicates that the “ typlinge-house ” and tlie ” nowty woman,” if they were ever true, were things of the past, while the emphasis upon the charge “ There is no sermons ” would imply that the complainant was quite of the Puritan sort, and therefore he may easily have been prejudiced. However that may be, when we next get any glimpse of church matters in Singleton, during the Puritan times, the old church, St. Mary’s, is not named, but Cromwell’s commissioners, in 1650, report a newly erected chapel there, without minister or maintenance, which the people pray may be constituted a parish church, and may he duly endowed. This does not appear to have been done, however, and after the Restoration this new chapel was disused ; and then finally it was turned into an inn, which was long called the “chapel” inn. Meanwhile, the original church, St. Mary’s Chapel, only an “ old thatched building,” had been again restored to its former use; and even after the manor had passed to a Protestant purchaser the chapel remained with the Catholics, and indeed till the year 1745 was the only place of worship in the township.

Now comes the singular conclusion to the story. In 1745 took place one of the great events in north of England history, the last attempt of the Stuarts, the uprising of the Scottish clans for the young Charles Edward, the Pretender. With a few thousand men he made his way into the heart of England. But the terrible lesson of the previous rising of 1715 was not forgotten, and though the Jacobites of the north wished that the rising might succeed, they had little real faith in it. Only one of the old Lancashire gentry, one of the Towneleys, actually joined in the movement; but a party of the rebels were feasted here in Mains Hall, and that was quite enough to make the neighboring old Lancashire families, who were mainly Jacobites and Catholics, quake in their shoes. When the rising was finally suppressed, the Protestant population throughout the kingdom were especially jubilant, and the 5th of November, the old Gunpowder Plot day, was celebrated that year with perhaps more enthusiasm than ever before or since. It was in this mood that the rabble of lads and men in Singleton went about collecting money and peats for their bonfire, and even applied at the house of the priest. The priest himself was a douce, quiet man, who probably would have given them what they asked for, and sent them away peaceably. But the priest was absent, and the priest’s old housekeeper was, as was entirely proper, a crabbed old woman, with a strong will and a sharp tongue ; and instead of giving them anything, she berated them as only such an old woman could. The upshot of it was that they got mad ; the row turned into an uproar, the uproar into a riot; the priest’s house was wrecked, and then they went to the chapel and wrecked that.

Under ordinary circumstances, or at a later day, the mob would have been punished, and the damaged property restored by the township. But, as I have said, the Catholics were discouraged; it was no time for vindicating their rights, or calling any more attention to themselves than they could help. So the Catholic service there ceased. Four years afterwards (1749), William Shaw, the then lord of the manor, formally made over the building to the Established Church, giving £200 for its endowment, to which another £200 was added from Queen Anne’s bounty, which latter circumstance may perhaps explain the fact that at the reopening the old consecration to St. Mary was ignored, perhaps forgotten, and it has ever since been known as St. Anne’s.

With this curious little supplement to the history of the Reformation, we come out of the twilight of the past into the glare and newness of the present. If you should find yourself in Singleton to-day, all that you would see would be a stretch of fertile fields, divided by trim hedges or clean-cut ditches, with scattered farms and farm buildings well renewed, characteristic of land worth high farming ; and here and there a schoolhouse, and a Methodist chapel, and a church of most modern Gothic, all new within some thirty years. But there is still the old grange, modernized now ; and there is Mains Hall, new fronted, but with walls in some places a yard thick, and secret closets which in Elizabeth’s time were “priest holes,” as the people call them, where Cardinal Allen certainly, and likely many another, found a safe shelter in the Elizabethan persecutions. And all the rest is in old deeds and charters, or in the stories that old men told by the chimney corner a generation or more ago ; for it is all true, and there is as much, if you will look for it, in every nook and corner of the dear old land.

Brooke Herford.