DOMESDAY SURVEY 



Makerfield, Salford, Blackburn, and Leyland, and it seems probable from their 

 assessments that the five-hide unit was in force here as in other counties. 

 Thus, West Derby contained approximately 120 carucates or 20 hides, 

 Newton 30 carucates or 5 hides, Warrington 58 carucates or nearly 10 hides, 

 Salford I2ii carucates or just over 20 hides, Blackburn 96 carucates and 

 Leyland 54, or together 25 hides. At the same time the existence of the 

 six-carucate unit appears not only from the assessment of six carucates as one 

 hide, but also from the assessments of the parishes, so far as it is possible to 

 reconstruct these by grouping the Domesday vills or manors and summing up 

 their individual carucage as deduced from records of the twelfth and thirteenth 

 centuries. It will be found that if the hundreds be thus divided into parishes, 

 the assessment of these latter will as a rule be approximately a simple multiple 

 of six carucates. A good example is the hundred of West Derby where the 

 parishes are rated in carucates as follows : Halsall 1 2, Ormskirk 1 2 J, Sefton 

 23 , Walton 36!, Huyton 12, and Childwall 22^. Allowing for the difficulty 

 of reconstructing the groups this is sufficiently near, and a still better case is 

 Leyland hundred where we find Penwortham 9 and Leyland 9, Croston 17!, 

 Eccleston i8j. 



We have thus what we may call a normal English, or hidal, assessment 

 imposed upon a normal Danish, or carucal, assessment ; the latter, instead of 

 being abolished, surviving, possibly for purposes of local taxation and jurisdic- 

 tion. A further interesting Danish survival is to be found in the style of 

 wapentake applied to the court of the hundred or ' shire,' to use the title 

 applied to these hundreds for centuries after the conquest, and even now em- 

 ployed colloquially by some of the oldest inhabitants. 



The boundaries of this interesting and unique region were clearly defined 

 by physical objects, the Mersey on the south, the Ribble on the north, and 

 the Pennine range on the east, a western spur of this range which divides the 

 watershed of the river Aire from the western Calder constituting a natural 

 boundary on the north-east. 



Immediately to the north of the Ribble lay Amounderness, within the 

 ancient kingdom of Northumbria and diocese of York, to whose cathedral 

 church this district was granted by King Athelstan in 93O. 1 But, as in the 

 case of an earlier grant to the monastery of Ripon, it was not destined long to 

 remain in the hands of the church, and by the end of the Confessor's reign it 

 was entirely in the hands of Tostig, earl of Northumberland. The wasted 

 condition of Amounderness in 1086 may have been due at least as much to 

 the deposition and outlawry promulgated against Tostig by the gemot at York 

 in 1065, followed by the slaughter of his followers and the plundering of his 

 possessions by his enemies, 2 as to the Conqueror's ravages. The whole of 

 this region was dependent on the capital manor of Preston, and was probably 

 divided into four parishes, Preston, Kirkham, Kirk Poulton, and St. Michael 

 on Wyre. After the conquest it was treated as a hundred, and the whole 

 was brought within the metes of the Forest of Lancaster. On the south 

 the Ribble formed the natural boundary, and on the east its tributary the 

 Hodder and the fells of Bowland and Bleasdale, while the vast peat mosses of 

 Pilling, Cockerham, Winmarleigh, and Garstang formed a natural division 

 from Lonsdale on the north. 



1 Historians of the Church ofTork (Rolls Ser.), iii. I. a Freeman, Norman Conquest, ii. 491-5. 



271 



