Fylde

“ We have now traced briefly the history of the Fylde through a period of eleven hundred years, and before entering on the era which dates from the accession of William the Conqueror, it will be well to review the traces and influences of the three dissimilar races, which have at different epochs usurped and settled on the territory of the old Setantii; our reference is, of course, to the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Danes. Under the first, great advances were made in civilisation ”

“ Lest, however, the reputations of our ancestors should suffer in the eyes of the present generation from the existence in their age of the absurdity here pictured, it is our duty and pleasure to assure all readers that such parodies on manhood were strictly confined to the populous cities, and that there is no probability of even a solitary specimen ever having desecrated the modest soil of the Fylde. ”

“ In the earlier part of last century the occupiers of Layton, Lytham, Fox, Burn, Mains, Rawcliffe, Rossall, Larbrick, etc., Halls, and others of equal social standing, who formed the gentry of the Fylde, and who consequently must be taken as our mirror of fashion, were clothed in straight square-cut waistcoats, extending to the knees, and of very gorgeous patterns ”

“ Amongst the wealthiest of the nation a flowing mantle, ornaments of precious metal, and sable, [117] beaver, and fox furs were common, but the inhabitants of the Fylde, being of less exalted social standing, were obliged to content themselves with the skins of lambs and cats by way of adornment. The inferior farm servants, called serfs, amongst whom many of the vanquished Britons would be classed, were seldom indulged by their masters with more than a coat, a pair of drawers, and sandals, the shirt, we presume, being deemed ill suited to their positions of servitude and dependence. ”

“ The right of fishery in the lake, for such it was in the earlier periods, was the subject of legal contest in the reign of Edward III., and in 1590 John Singleton, of Staining Hall, held the privilege.
There are few districts of similar area which can boast so many and such interesting varieties of the feathered tribes, either natives or visitants, as the Fylde. Some of the rarest sea-fowl are occasionally seen along the coasts, while the fields and hedgerows abound with most of the melodious songsters of our island. ”

“ We can only discover a record of one witch in the Fylde; this person of unenviable notoriety is stated to have had her abode in Singleton, and to have been known to the villagers as Mag Shelton. Her food, according to local tradition, was composed of boiled groats mixed with thyme or parsley, and numerous are the anecdotes related of her evil machinations and doings in the neighbourhood—the cows of the country people were constantly milked by her, whilst the pitcher walked before her in the form of a goose; lives were blighted and prosperity checked by the influence of her evil eye. ”

“ The traffic over the Roman road through the district must have been almost continuous, to judge from the abundance of horse-shoes and other matters picked up along its route, and whether the harbour of the Setantii was on Wyre, Ribble, or elsewhere, it is evident from the course taken by the well constructed path that something of importance, say a favourable spot for embarcation or debarcation, attracted the inhabitants across the soil of the Fylde towards its north-west boundary. ”

“ In accordance with the royal mandate, which was circulated in secret, the Anglo-Saxon populace of the villages and farms of the Fylde, as elsewhere, rose at the appointed day upon the unprepared and unsuspecting Northmen, barbarously massacring old and young, male and female alike. Great must have been the slaughter in districts like our own, where from the Danes having been established for so many generations and its proximity to the coast and the estuaries of Wyre and Ribble, a safe landing and a friendly soil would be insured, and attract numbers of their countrymen from Scandinavia. ”

“ Penny Stone: a Tradition of the Fylde.
It was a bonny day on the 5th of March, 1860, when I visited Norbreck, just before those tides came on which had been announced as higher than any for a century previous. This announcement brought thousands of people from the interior into Blackpool and other places on that coast. Many came expecting the streets to be invaded by the tide, and a great part of the level Fylde laid under water; with boats plying above the deluged fields, to rescue its inhabitants from the towers of churches and the tops of farmhouses. ”

“ The Country or district of the Fylde may be briefly described as broad and flat, for although in many places it is raised in gentle undulations, no hill of any altitude is to be seen upon its surface. The fertility of its soil has long been acknowledged, and a visit to its fruitful fields during the warm months of summer would disclose numbers of rich acres yellow with the ripening grain, while potatoe and bean-fields, meadow and pasture-lands, orchards and fruit gardens, are scattered over the wide area. ”

“ In this rising, as in the earlier one, the inhabitants of the Fylde evinced their prudence and good sense by remaining as nearly neutral as their allegiance to the reigning monarch would permit them. Those insurgents who found their way into the district were treated with kindness, but no encouragement was given them to prolong their stay, either by professions of sympathy or offers of assistance in their insurrectionary enterprise. ”

“ Michael’s; and the parish of Kirkham, exclusive of Goosnargh-with-Newsham and Whittingham, are comprised in the Fylde country.
The word Amounderness was formerly considered to signify the “Promontory of Agmund,” or “Edmund,” and this origin is alluded to in a treatise written some years since by Mr. Thomas [2] Baines on the “Valley of the Mersey,” in which the following remarks occur:—“In the year 911 the Northumbrians themselves began the war, for they despised the peace which King Edward and his ‘Witan’ offered them, and overran the land of Mercia. ”

“ No [88] portion of the British conquest cost the conquerors more trouble, time, and bloodshed, than did the land peopled by the hardy and valorous Brigantes with their comparatively small, but equally intrepid, neighbours and allies the Setantii. The two most striking characteristics of the aboriginal Fylde inhabitants were their ignorance and bravery, and whilst the former rivetted the chains which held them in subjection to the priesthood, the latter incited them to oppose to the death the usurpations of the stranger. ”

“ The large district of western Lancashire, denominated from time immemorial the Fylde, embraces one third at least of the Hundred of Amounderness, and a line drawn from Ashton, on the Ribble, to Churchtown, on the Wyre, forms the nearest approach to an eastern boundary attainable, for although the section cut off by its means includes more land and villages than properly appertain to the Fylde, a more westerly division would exclude others which form part of it. The whole of the parishes of Bispham, Lytham, Poulton, and St. ”

“ The old bridge in use at the period to which we allude, still exists, but is built over and hidden by the present erection. Later experience has taught the agriculturist that the soil of the Fylde is capable of producing, under proper tillage, other crops, equal in their abundance to the one to which it appears formerly to have been mainly devoted, and it would be difficult at the present day to enumerate with accuracy the many and varied fruits of the earth that have found a home in the Corn-field of Amounderness. ”

“ At the close of the Saxon dynasty the number of acres in cultivation in the manor of Bispham exceeded those of the five next largest manors in the Fylde by two hundred, thus Staining, Layton, Singleton, Marton, and Thornton, each contained six hundred acres of arable soil, whilst Bispham had eight hundred in a similar condition. About thirty years after the Norman Survey, Geoffrey, the sheriff, bestowed the tithes of Biscopham, upon the newly founded priory of St. Mary, in Lancaster, being incited thereto by the munificent example of Roger de Poictou. ”

“ We hasten to lay at your Majesty’s feet the dutiful allegiance of the inhabitants of the youngest Town and Port in all your Majesty’s dominions, which dates its existence from the very year in which your Majesty first ascended the Throne of these realms; and which, from the barren and uninhabited sands of the Fylde of Lancashire, has already obtained some importance for its town of 3,000 inhabitants, its Watering-place, Harbour, and Railway, together with its College for the sons of clergymen and other gentlemen. ”

“ The family of the Cliftons, whose present seat is Lytham Hall, has been associated with the Fylde for many centuries. The earliest ancestor of whom there exists any authentic record, was Sir William de Clyfton, who lived in the time of William II., surnamed Rufus, and during the last year of that monarch’s reign, A.D. 1100, gave certain lands in Salwick to his son William [156] upon his marriage. In 1258 a namesake and descendant of this William de Clyfton held ten carucates of land in Amounderness, and was a collector of aids for the county of Lancaster. ”

“ There is nothing of local interest to recount during the period the Romans held the soil, but after their abdication, when the Anglo-Saxons violated their faith and traitorously seized a land which they had come professedly to protect, the Fylde began to evince symptoms of greater animation; villages sprang up in different spots on the open grounds or clearings in the woods; the solitary Roman settlement at Kirkham was appropriated and renamed by the new arrivals, and, perhaps, for the first time a population of numerical importance was established in the district. ”

“ About a century ago oats formed the chief production, and [113] nearly, if indeed not quite, the only grain crop cultivated in the Fylde. When reaped, in harvest time, this commodity was carried on the backs of pack-horses to the markets of Poulton, Kirkham, Garstang, and Preston. The “horse bridge” between Carleton and Poulton was originally a narrow structure, capable only of affording passage to a single horse at once, and it was from the practice of the farmers, with their laden cattle, crossing the stream by its aid, when journeying to market, that the bridge derived its name. ”

“ Here, where I have sometimes made a little havoc among his "Bergamots," "Old Keswicks," and "Scotch Bridgets," we walked about, whilst I took a parting look at the landscape. Immediately behind us the sea was singing its old song; and below lay the little rural parish, "where," as I heard the rector say in one of his sermons, "a man cannot walk into the open air but all his neighbours can see him." Beyond, the tranquil Fylde stretches out its drowsy green, now oblivious of all remembrance of piratical ravage, which so often swept over it in ancient times. ”

“ The rapidity of its early growth may be inferred from the following paragraph, extracted from a volume on Lancashire, published during the infancy of this new offspring of the Fylde:—“As a bathing place, it possesses very superior attractions: hot water baths, inns, and habitations of all kinds have sprung as if by magic on one of the most agreeable sites it is possible to imagine, very superior to any other [82] in Lancashire, admitting, as from a central point, excursions by land and water in all directions, amongst some of the most beautiful scenery in the empire. ”

“ All these vills belong to Prestune (Preston) ; and there are three churches (in Amounderness) . In sixteen of these vills [18] there are but few inhabitants—but how many there are is not known.
The rest are waste. Roger de Poictou had [the whole] .
When we read the concluding remark—“The rest are waste,” and observe the insignificant proportion of the many thousands of acres comprised in the Fylde at that time under cultivation, we are made forcibly cognizant of the truly deplorable condition to which the district had been reduced by ever-recurring warfare through a long succession of years. ”

“ In those conflicts our county was well and effectively represented in the person of Paulinus, the commander of the right wing of the army, who after many brave and sanguinary struggles overthrew the hitherto unconquered Octa, and for a time, at least, delivered the Fylde and other parts of Northumbria from the rule of the Saxons. This gallant soldier was the offspring of a union between a Roman warrior and a British maiden, who had established themselves in Manchester. The chieftain Ella, however, compelled the Britons to submission, and assumed the government over part of Northumbria. ”

“ Admitting the force of reasoning brought forward by the last authority, it can readily be conceived that the purity of the aboriginal tribes would in a great measure be destroyed at an early epoch, and that subsequent alliances with the Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, have rendered all conjectures as to the race of forefathers to which the inhabitants of the Fylde have most claim practically valueless. ”

“ These constant drains upon its resources, and the devastations committed by riotous companies of armed men, so impoverished our district that the inhabitants of Poulton forwarded a petition to the Pope, praying him to forego his claims upon their town on account of the deplorably distressed condition to which they had been reduced. The taxations of all churches in the Fylde were greatly lowered in consideration of the indigency of the people; that of Kirkham from 240 marks per annum to 120, and the others in like proportion. ”