A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 



APPENDIX I 



THE DIOCESE OF CARLISLE 



AS the diocese of Carlisle was founded nearly half a century before the counties of Cum- 

 berland and Westmorland took their present shape, the boundaries of these civil divisions 

 had no effect in determining its extent. The district or land of Carlisle from which 

 Dolfin was expelled by William Rufus was a strip of territory between the rivers Esk and 

 Derwent, extending eastward from the Solway to the Reycross on Stanemore on the borders 

 of Yorkshire, and cut off from Northumberland and Durham by the Pennine range of hills. 

 It embraced the whole of Cumberland as it now is, with the exception of the south-western 

 angle between the Derwent and the Duddon, known as the county or barony of Coupland, 

 and the eastern portion of Westmorland, known as the county or barony of Appleby. The 

 present county of Westmorland was thus divided into two parts, the barony of Appleby, which 

 was included in the land of Carlisle, and the barony of Kendal, which at the date of the cre- 

 ation of the bishopric was a part of the great county of York. Some time after the conquest 

 in 1092, the new district was placed under the rule of Ranulf Meschin as the vassal of the 

 English crown, and its ecclesiastical supervision passed at once to the jurisdiction of the arch- 

 bishop of York. In order to set at rest the rival claims of the bishops of Glasgow and Durham, 

 who from certain historical associations were contending for its oversight, and to assist more 

 directly its ecclesiastical development, Henry I. created the new province into a bishopric 

 with the seat of the bishop in the priory church which he had founded in Carlisle. Except 

 in the cases of three parishes on the northern and eastern bounds of modern Cumberland 

 with very peculiar histories, the extent of the diocese of Carlisle had undergone no alteration 

 from the date of its formation in 1133 till its enlargement in 1856. 



The parish of Alston on the eastern border has the peculiar distinction of being in the 

 county of Cumberland and diocese of Durham. It is quite certain that this district formed 

 no part of Ranulf Meschin's fief, and that the church there was never within the jurisdiction 

 of the bishop of Carlisle. The parish, cut off from the land of Carlisle by the natural barriers 

 of hills and wastes, was part of the liberty of Hexham or Tyndal, and lay without the county 

 of Cumberland after its formation as a fiscal area about 1174.' On the other hand, the small 

 parish of Over Denton in the same neighbourhood, consisting only of a thousand acres, though 

 in the county of Cumberland, remained in the diocese of Durham till the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century. 2 Both of these churches were in the deanery of Corbridge and arch- 

 deaconry of Northumberland, and were valued as such in the taxation of Pope Nicholas IV. 

 on 20 December 1291 ; though Over Denton is not noticed in the valuation of Henry VIII. 

 in 1535, it is included, with the parish of Alston, in the deanery of Corbridge on the appended 

 map of the diocese of Durham. 3 How this singular arrangement came about will be more 

 conveniently explained when the history of individual parishes and advowsons of churches 



1 The early history of the advowson of Alston is stated on the pleadings in Quo Warranto (Rec. Com.), 

 p. 120. Its subsequent history may be seen in Raine, Priory of Hexham (Surtees Soc.), ii. pp. ix. 119, and 

 the references there given. In the Nonas Rolls of Northumberland for 1340 the commissioner reported 

 that he did not answer for Alston ' quia est infra libertatem de Hextildesham ubi nullum breve regis 

 currit ' (Hodgson, Hist, of Northumberland, iii. pt. iii. p. xxxvii.) 



a The advowson of Over Denton was given to the priory of Lanercost by Buethbarn in the twelfth 

 century (Reg. of Lanercost, MS. iii. I, 2, xii. 26, i. 4, 5). It is stated in the Nonas Rolls that Denton 

 in Gyldesland formed part of the deanery of Corbridge, but was not in the county of Northumberland 

 (Hodgson, Hist. iii. pt. iii. p. xxxvii.) For the final transference of the church of Denton from the 

 diocese of Durham to that of Carlisle in 1703, and for its history as far as it could be gathered at that 

 date from the episcopal registers of Durham, see Bishop Nicolson, Miscellany Accounts (Cumbld. and 

 Westmorld. Archseol. Soc.), p. 4. 



Compare Taxatio Eccl. (Rec. Com.), p. 316, with Valor Eccl. (Rec. Com.), v. 328. The distinc- 

 tion between Nether Denton and Over Denton in both valuations is clearly discernible. 



116 



