A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE 



from the Duddon to the Mersey : opportunity which the occurrence of many 

 old Norse place names along the coast, and even inland, shows was abundantly 

 seized by the roving bands of Danes and Norsemen who infested the Irish sea 

 during the century preceding the Norman invasion. 



From these circumstances of position it follows that boundaries would 

 seldom be of old standing, nomenclature would bear the. marks of intermixed 

 tongues, and land tenure would show customs more or less foreign to each 

 other co-existent. The combination in this county of Northumbrian, Mercian, 

 and Danish place names, to which so long ago as 1801 the historian, 

 Dr. Whitaker, called attention,^ bears witness to the intermixture of languages ; 

 of the confusion of customs and tenure, such features as the overlapping of the 

 hide and the carucate, the simultaneous use of such terms as wapentake, shire, 

 and hundred, and the incidence of thegnage, drengage, and cornage tenure 

 side by side, are eloquent. The question of the boundaries can best be settled 

 by separate consideration of the several regions which were eventually united 

 to form the county of Lancaster. 



Of these regions, that between Ribble and Mersey was the most homo- 

 geneous and bore evidence of the oldest settlement. The Anglo-Saxon 

 Chronicle' records the conquest of this region by the English king in 923, 

 when it appears to have been severed from the kingdom of Northumbria and 

 united to that of Mercia. As one result of this conquest, it was placed under 

 the ecclesiastical administration of the bishop of Lichfield, of whose diocese 

 it continued to form part until the foundation of the see of Chester in 1541. 

 Another result of the re-organization at this time is probably to be seen in the 

 remarkable double assessment of the district which an examination of the 

 Domesday survey reveals. 



Throughout England there were two systems of assessment for the geld: 

 in the one the hide, and its quarter, the virgate, were the units ; in the other 

 the carucate, or ploughland, and its eighth part the bovate, or oxgang. The 

 latter system, which was prevalent in the counties colonized by the Danes, is 

 also marked by the tendency of the vills to be assessed, either singly or in 

 groups, in multiples of six carucates ' ; the other system being marked by 

 a similar recurring multiple of five hides. In the southern portion of 

 Lancashire we have the unique feature of the one system superimposed 

 upon the other. 



This land between Ribble and Mersey was rated at the time of the 

 Domesday survey at eighty hides, less one — the exempted hide being probably 

 land belonging to the parish churches* ; and the record informs us (f. 269/^) 

 that in each of these hides there were six carucates. At the time of the 

 survey this region was sub-divided into six hundreds, which took their names 

 from the king's six capital manors of West Derby, Warrington, Newton in 



1 Hist. ofWhalle-j (1872), i. 52. 



' Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Rolls Ser.), i. 196. * Round, Feudal England, pp. 69 et seqq. 



* Although church lands were liable to pay geld before the conquest, as stated in the survey, some church 

 lands in this region were evidently not included in the total of 79 hides. For example, Bootle cum Linacre 

 was rated at 2 carucates and another carucate belonged to the church of Walton ; records of the thirteenth 

 century prove that this township contained 3 carucates, and yet only 2 carucates were included in the Domes- 

 day total of 79 hides. The survey also records holdings of 3 hides, 2 hides and i hide, held by knights in 

 10S6, with half a carucate added in each case. It seems probable that these half carucates represented church 

 lands, and their attachment to fees of one or more hides may well have some bearing on the question of the 

 exemption of certain church lands from geld. 



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