44 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF BLACKPOOL AND DISTRICT 



Besides the early names mentioned in this article there are in the Fylde some 

 names of later date, some designating places now important, towns or holiday 

 resorts. The old capital of the Fylde was Poulton-le-Fylde, but its place has 

 now been taken by Blackpool, which was formerly Layton with Warbreck. 

 Blackpool was the name of a peaty-coloured pool in the township, which gave its 

 name to a farm, called Pull in the thirteenth century. The name Blackpool 

 is recorded from 1661. 



Fleetwood, a town on the Rossall peninsula, grew up in the earlier half 

 of the nineteenth century. It was named from Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood, 

 the founder of the town. 



St. Annes-on-the-Sea is now a seaside resort. The place took its 

 name from a church built in 1 873 and dedicated to St. Anne. 



For a full treatment of the place-names of the Fylde I refer to my book, 

 The Place-names of Lancashire, published in 1 922 by the Manchester University 

 Press. 



X. 



AGRARIAN EVOLUTION 

 SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



BY 



WILFRED SMITH. 



By the end of the eighteenth century the townfields of the Fylde had wholly 

 passed under enclosure, although much marsh and moss remained as common 

 waste and common turbary. The urge to enclosure was provided by the rapid 

 growth of the industrial population of South Lancashire and in the eighteenth 

 century the Fylde had become the granary of the county. It was asserted 

 at the end of the century that Lancashire grew corn sufficient to satisfy 

 her requirements for only three months in the year, and the significance 

 of the Fylde as a granary is indicated by the abundance of windmills, eight 

 of which still exist to-day. Enclosure, however, had here preceded the 

 New Husbandry. The improved crop rotations worked out in Norfolk, 

 and the improved stock bred by Bakewell, were only beginning to be intro- 

 duced. The natural fertility of the clayey loams of the Fylde was abused 

 by constant cropping for corn. ' Certain fields have been kept under cultiva- 

 tion, it is asserted, for more than a century without intermission,' wrote J. Holt, 

 the Surveyor for the Board of Agriculture, in 1795. Oats were commonly 

 sown for years together, varied occasionally by a summer fallow followed by 

 wheat, or by beans and barley in alternate years, or by self-sown grass and weed 

 seeds, which provided indifferent pasture prior to marling and renewed corn 

 cultivation. Marling was the standard manunal treatment and marl pits, now 

 filled with water, are still to be found in almost every field. 



