POLITICAL HISTORY 



La Marche, held both banks of the Ribble, his fief including Amounderness 

 as well as ' between Ribble and Mersey.' Both had been resumed by the 

 crown in or before 1086, but besides many manors in Suffolk, Essex, Lin- 

 colnshire, and Nottinghamshire he still held land in the West Riding, with 

 the district of Bowland adjoining Amounderness on the east, the extensive 

 manor of Beetham round the Kent estuary, and a smaller but fairly com- 

 pact fief on the south-west side of the estuary of the Lune.** For this and 

 other reasons his loss of Amounderness and 'between Ribble and Mersey' 

 may with probability be traced to some readjustment of his possessions 

 rather than to forfeiture for complicity in his eldest brother's rebellion five 

 years before.*' 



So far, if we are not mistaken, Roger had not had in his possession more 

 than a part of the lands now comprised in North Lancashire, and this part 

 did not include Lancaster, which is entered as one of the vills of Halton, a 

 manor apparently retained in demesne." In any case, the survival of the pre- 

 Conquest manors shows that the boundaries of the future county in this 

 quarter were not yet drawn. They were incidentally fixed when William 

 Rufus, early in his reign (before 1094) divided the whole of the ill-organized 

 territory bounded on the south by Amounderness, on the east by Yorkshire, 

 and on the north by the Scottish fief of Cumbria (Carlisle) between Roger 

 and Ivo Taillebois, lord of Spalding in Lincolnshire." Roger, who had won 

 Rufus' favour by a timely desertion of Duke Robert in 1088, not only re- 

 covered ' between Ribble and Mersey ' and Amounderness, but had his fief 

 in the valley of the Lune extended to include the whole of what is now the 

 hundred of Lonsdale south of the Sands. Its boundaries were drawn with 

 little regard to physical features, and did not always respect existing parochial 

 boundaries. On the east, where it marched with Ivo's manor of Burton-in- 

 Lonsdale, afterwards the Yorkshire wapentake of Ewcross, the frontier cut 

 across the valleys of the eastern feeders of the Lune and divided the parish of 

 Thornton between the two fiefs, and so ultimately between two counties.*' 

 Its northern limit, dividing it from Ivo's Kendal (Kentdale) fief (now southern 

 Westmorland), to which Roger resigned all the vills of his Beetham manor 

 except Yealand, included territory (down to the River Keer) which geo- 

 graphically belonged to Kentdale and long afterwards retained the name,*' and 

 it cut the parish of Burton-in-Kendal into two.'" 



" Dom. Bk. I, 332. Mr. Farrer thinks that he had held all the Northumbrian manors enumerated above. 

 This entails the assumption that what is said of his former ownership at the end of the Amounderness entry 

 {Dm. Bk. i, 301^) must be understood as applying to Halton and the other manors which follow, a rather 

 strained hypothesis even if the compilers had not left a blank space after the Amounderness entry. The view 

 taken in the text is not without its difHculties, but seems on the whole more probable. 



" The form in which the termination of his tenure here and in Norfolk {Dom. Bk. ii, 293) is noted, and 

 the entry of the northern manors which he retained on a separate folio (ibid, i, 332) at the end of the York- 

 shire survey after the index of tenants-in-chiefs (fol. 298^) had been drawn up, suggests that this readjustment 

 was not completed till the Domesday returns had been digested. Some of his Yorkshire manors had been 

 previously held by other Norman lords. 



" But this is not Mr. Farrer's view ; see note 44 above. He is of the opinion that Roger had already 

 held Lancaster and built the castle. He certainly had a castle somewhere on his northern fief before 1086 

 iflom. Bk. I, ■i'i'2-), but this may have been that recorded at Penwortham (ibid, i, 270), or one at Clitheroe. 



" Lanes. Pipe R. 269, 289 ; Dugdale Mon. iii, 548-9, 553 ; Tait, Mediaeval Manchester, 159. 



" Ireby, though in Lancashire, is in the parish of Thornton in Yorkshire. 



" Which is applied, for example, in the Cockersand Chart. (105 2 sub anno 1262) to the district between 

 the Keer and the northern boundary of the county. 



" Leaving the township of Dalton in Roger's fief. 



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