A History of Latchford: a Cheshire township on the south side of the Mersey, etc

Front matter

A IT d. HISTORY OF LATCHFORD A CHESHIRE TOWNSHIP ON THE SOUTH SIDE OF THE MERSEY, WHICH DIVIDES FROM WARRINGTON ; THE WHOLE OF WHICH TOWN- SHIP OF LATCHFORD, EXCEPT A VERY SMALL PART, IS NOW INCORPORATED WITH THE BOROUGH OF WARRINGTON. With each and all Old Mer»ey's Ford town still Holding communion freely at our will, Calls o'er the stream, th' admiring South to see The pomp and pride of Northern industry. Lines by John Fitch ctt, Esq., a native Barr BY WILLIAM BEAMONT, Esq. WARRINGTON: PERC1VAL PEARSE, SANKEY STREET. 1889. PRINTED AT THE GUARDIAN OFFICE, WARRINGTON HISTORY OF LATCHFORD.

Chapter I

Latchford, a Cheshire township, which is now part of the borough of Warrington, is not the only place of its name in England, for there is a hamlet so called in the parish of Great Hoseley, in the hundred of Ewelme, inthe county of Oxford, and it was to this place and not to the Cheshire township that the licence refers which King Edward I., in the 21st year of his reign, granted to Henry Fitz Nigel, to give a toft and 38 acres of land to the abbot and convent of Thame and their successors.* But what, it may be asked at the outset, is the derivation of the name ? Latchford has been conjectured to be Llechffordd, which is said to be the British for Flat-Stone-Ford, and it has been suggested that large flat stones were placed here in the channel of the Mersey, by which persons might ford the river dry shod.t Another etymologist says Lache, the first syllable in Latchford, means a boggy depression in the moors, Laag vallis,% and a third tells us that * Kennett's " Paroch.

Antiquities,'' 456. t The Rev. Edmund Sibson in Baines's Lancashire, 1836, vol. III., 580 in notis. } Whitaker's Craven, 421 in notis. Letch means a swang or marshy gutter.* But if Camden,. the venerable father of British antiquities, could confess himself a sceptic in the matter of the etymology of names, we may reasonably hesitate about adopting any of the foregoing conjectures as to the origin of the name Latchford. The place may possibly, if not probably, have had another name among our British ancestors, but its present Saxon name, which, however, it had not acquired at the Conquest, if the silence of the present Domesday survey upon the subject be any argument, seems to mean that, like the ferry at West Bank which could not be approached with horses and carriages without a toll, it was an enclosed ford, and only approachable through private lands.

The pleadings which will be alluded to hereafter will show this to have been the case, and this early charter, which Sir Peter Leycester gives us, makes the matter still clearer. " Sciant &c. Ego Willielmus Boydell filius domini Johannis Boydell dedi Willielmo filio meo totum passagium meum cum proficuis et apendiciis omnibus inde emergentibus per Eghes de Lachford ad totam vitam suam 12 Ed. III., 1338."! It was probably their ownership of the ford and the ferry that threw upon the Boydells and their successors, the owners of the ford, the obligation to repair Latchford causeway ratione tenures, a a obligation which rested on them until the county of Chester, quite in recent times, for a money consideration paid by the owners of the lands, relieved them of all future liability.! * Cumberland words in Cooke's Topography, p. 172. t Liber C, 287.

I There is a Laxford in Lord Reay's country, which it is suggested means the ford ofthe Lax, the Teutonic word for Salmon (Salmonia, p. 127). But our present business has to do with the ford at this place at a period much earlier than the Saxon times. The learned historian of Manchester, in his work published in ■the year 1771, after referring to some traces of the Roman roads near Warrington, proceeds thus : — "All these roads must have met at the old ford over the Mersey. There the northern and southern road always met, and there was always the way into the town from Cheshire, even to the days of our seventh Henry and the erection of the present bridge; and the road in Stretton " (one of those to which he had referred) " which points out the course of the southern road near Warrington, lies directly in the line betwixt the old ford and the angle that the road now forms in order to reach the bridge.

Here, therefore, just upon the ford of the Mersey, was a Roman station, though equally overlooked by antiquaries and forgotten by tradition. The ford was at the extremity of some flat pastures, and led directly into a village, which from it is denominated Latchford. It was formed by a shoal of gravel upon a bed of marl, was about 30 yards in width, and had frequently in a dry summer not more than two feet of water upon it ; and the road of access to it was by the lane at the angle of Church-street, across the level fields which are called the Broad Howley, or low grounds, and along the margin of the river."* The copper coin of Vespasian found near Mersey Mills, and now deposited in the Warrington Museum, may have been dropped by some Roman soldier in going to or from the ford. In the peninsula where Mr. Whittaker placed the site of the .Roman station which he supposed to have existed at * Hist, of Manchester, vol. I., 152 to 164.

Warrington, and which he connected with Latchford by the ford, there have been found since his time parts of a quern and several other remains which evidently show that the ford was not unfrequented.* After describing the singular fitness of the peninsula for a fort, Mr. Whittaker again proceeds thus : " Upon a stream whose largeness has made it frequently the boundary of kingdoms, and whose rapidity and deepness must ever have made it formidable* to passing armies, this ford, the only certain passage over the river from the mouth of its channel to the shallow at Thelwall (where, near the Old Warps, there was very early a weir and a salmon fishery, but I find that in high tides the water rises three or more feet above the weir at Woolston, which is two or three miles higher up the river than that at Howley) must necessarily have been a post of some importance in war, and upon a bank which from the lowness of its level surface could afford no. convenient position at all for a fortress, such a site marked out by the plainest characters for the area of a fortress, and placed directly upon one end of the ford, must necessarily have been of equal importance in war.

So must the Sistuntii (of Lancashire) have thought when, on the irruption of the Carnabii into the provinces of their southern neighbours, they resolved to provide for their own security by the fortification of their southern border. In this prudent resolution, surveying the banks of their limitary stream, the ford at Warrington necessarily attracting their attention, they must have eagerly seized this remarkable peninsula, and have settled a sufficient garrison within it. The isthmus in its narowest point was * MS. Note, in the copy of the Hist, of Manchester in the Warrington. Museum Library, p. 152. only about ten yards in width, at the height ofthe tide, and about twenty at its recess, and would be easily secured by a rampart and a ditch. And a rampart of seven or eight feet in height, accessible not by openings in the line of the vallum but by sloping ascents to the crest of it, would prevent all those accidental overflowings ofthe land floods to which the ground must have been previously subject, and by which it is even now covered once or twice in a winter.

" When the Romans began to secure, by the construction of several stations, their new conquest in Lancashire (about the year 79), the same reasons which had previously induced the Britons to select would easily induce the Romans to retain this little peninsula of sand for the area of a regular fortress. The extent of it, indeed, was larger than what they generally chose for the compass of a station ; but such a choice was merely founded upon a principle of military ecomony, and was calculated to prevent a greater detail of expenses by precluding the necessity of more numerous defendants ; and the necessary number of defendants for this station could never have been larger than for the castrum at Manchester, as in this station the soldiers needed only to defend the breadth of thirty yards at the ford, and the width of twenty at the isthmus.

The river was a sufficient defence on every other side, carrying in all parts a depth of three or four yards, and having probably those deep holes in some which have long given to the whole site the popular denomination of hell holes ; and the Roman roads from Coccium to Condate, passing along the narrow isthmus, and approaching the western rampart, must have gently curved on the right by the south-western angle of the latter, and have edged along the southern side of the station, and just beneath the southern vallum. The passage of the river would never have been attempted, but during the absence of the tide ; and during that absence this road must have been safely travelled, extending along the lower bank of the river, and leading over the ford to the high grounds of Latchford. So broad was the isthmus after it had been for ages silently corroded and violently plundered by the wasting waters, and about thirty-five years ago (that is about the year 1736), the river bringing down an extraor dinary body of water from its native hills and discharging the fury of it directly against the opposing isthmus, the whole strong substance of the mound began to shake, soon opened, and instantly disappeared.

The Mersey having now obtained a direct way, immediately deserted the winding course of its current, and transferred the site of the fortress from the northern to the southern bank, leaving its old important ford to be merely a sludgy way into a pasture, and giving up its old important channel to be partitioned by a hedge, and to be grazed upon by cattle." c We have given this account for the purpose of showing whereabouts the old ford was supposed to have crossed the river into Latchford. According to ihe opinion of Mr. Whitaker, this was somewhere nearly opposite to the entrance of that very ancient highway, the Wash Lane, in Latchford, which is raised above the adjoining low-lying meadows, and for the most part out of the reach of the floodway. * Whitaker's History of Manchester, vol. I., pp. 152 to 164.

Chapter II

Although nothing is more certain than that a Roman road existed on both . sides of the Mersey at War rington, yet hitherto nothing has seemed more uncertain than the exact point at which it crossed the river from the north, and then held on its course to the station at Wilderspool. Mr. Whitaker, as we have seen, expresses an opinion that the road entered the tongue of land near the river in Warrington, which, until about the year 1736, formed a peninsula ; but which in that year, by a sudden flood, was converted into an island, and transferred from Warrington on the north, to Latchford on the south side of the stream. In the copy of Mr. Whitaker's book pre served in the Warrington Museum library there is a manuscript note by one of his readers, made apparently soon after the time when the book was published, which says Mr. Whitaker was very unfortunate in placing his supposed station at Warrington in a place which was liable to be covered with water, not once or twice a year only, but all the year through.

He further states that there was not the least appearance of the ground in the peninsula having ever been disturbed except that a small hill had been raised upon its northern bank of no older a date than the time of Charles II. , and then, Clarendon being quoted as the authority, it is stated that as the King was passing through Warrington, before the battle of Worcester, a body of his forces lay in ambush in the peninsula, and there flanking the Parliament forces, commanded, it is said, by Lambert, as they came to recon noitre along the road from Latchford, killed a great many of them. Another contemporary manuscript note says that the only hill on the peninsula was one thrown up by the writer's friend, Mathew Lyon, as a retreat for his sheep in the time of floods. Pennant, who visited Latch ford after Mr. Whitaker's time, says : "I say nothing ofthe Roman antiquity of Warrington, the proofs rest on the probability of there having been a station at the head of Latchford, the usual passage into the town at low water before the bridge was built, a place no longer probable."

About the year 1800, when the Old Quay Canal was made, the peninsula was cut through, and a large portion of its easterly end was thus severed from the rest, and as it seemed to be desirable to ascertain what, if anything, was then revealed of the early condition of the place, and what, if any, remains were found during the course of making the canal, such of the workmen as were living in and after the year 1825 were seen, and the following are their examinations, which were then taken : — Lawrence Spencer, a workman, who knew the tongue of land very well before the canal was cut, said it was then not very much unlike what it has been ever since. There were no buildings or earthworks of any sort upon the place, and he never heard that in cutting the canal any remains of antiquity were found, of which, as he lived so near, he thought he must have heard if any such thing had occurred.

Peter Ford, who was an overlooker of the works when the canal was cut, said that in cutting it neither a road nor any other Roman remains were found between the Latchford Lock and the Black Bear Bridge ; but he had heard that many such remains were found at Wilderspool. Robert Foulkes and John Wilde, who both worked at making the canal, had heard that many remains were found near the windmill, at Wilderspool ; but they neither saw nor heard of any road or other old thing being found in the tongue of land between the Latchford Lock and the Black Bear Bridge. William Ford, ofthe Lock House, at Latchford, who assisted in cutting the canal in 1800, said he never heard that any ancient remains were discovered in doing the work between the lock and the Black Bear Bridge, and he believed that if any discoveries had been made, he must have heard of them.

Thomas Ward, of Runcorn, harbour master, said he had been all his life employed on the river Mersey and the Old Quay Canal. His father was a flatman in the river company's service, and he served with him from the time that he was nine years old. He very well remembered the Old Quay Canal being cut, but he never heard either then or since that any old road was cut through, or that any antiquities were found there. Thomas Booth, one of his neighbours, was engaged in the work, and neither from him nor anyone else did he ever hear that any such discoveries were made ; and he thought he must have heard of them, had any such been made. One of the old work men who was engaged in the work told him there was nothing of antiquity found in making the canal, but that when they were repairing the foundations of the Latchford Lock, which is outside the peninsula, they came in contact,. below the dock sill, with a huge oak tree, which was quite sound, but as black as ink, and so heavy that they could not draw it out even with their best machinery.

James Ridiough had often heard that there was an old ford near Howley, by which people went to London before the bridge was built. He had heard of a gravel road being discovered in the fields between the end of the Orsord Avenue and the south-west end of the Green Lane, near Longford. J. Harrison, of School Brow, said there was an old road, composed of a deep bed of gravel, which was always said to be the Roman road, and which ran on the west of Orsord Hall, coursed through the Sixpenny Fields, and went by the church to the Old Ford. John Gaskell, who was a scholar of the Warrington Grammar School, remembered the road mentioned by Mr. Harrison. It led past the Grammar School towards the church, and was called the London road. When the Rev. Edward Owen, who was headmaster ofthe school, built his stables, he built them upon this road and stopped it up.

The foundations of the Roman road were said to have been discovered in diggingthe foundations of a shed in the rope walk held by Charnock at the top of Battersby Lane. Ralph Norman, Thomas Jackson, Samuel Mather, and Thomas Picton were unanimous in declaring that' there was formerly a causeway which led from near the site of the old Latchford turnpike to Wilderspool. Richard Wright, of Latchford, farmer, who was ex amined on the 15th October, 1830, said that in his field, called the New Hey, which lies a little to the east of the Old Quay Canal, and very pear it, about half-way between the Black Bear, in Latchford, and Wilderspool, in a place where the land lies high, he discovered the foundation of a building of bur stones, each of which measured a yard or more in length. About the foundation there lay a black substance like ashes.

To use his own words, " There was nothing found that was fine, or as one may say, ornamental, but I took the building to have been once a lighthouse set up to show the way across the broad expanse of the flat meadows below." There are certainly not now in the peninsula the remains of any elevation such as either that mentioned in the MS. note to Whitaker's Museum volume, which describes the ambuscade there of Charles II. 's troops, or that other, said to have been thrown up by Mathew Lyon as a retreat for his sheep in time of floods. In Clarendon there is no such passage as that to which the annotator refers, besides which, Harrison, and not Lambert, commanded the Parliamentary troops who opposed the King's passage over Warrington Bridge, and the approach and passage of the Royal army was too rapid to admit of any ambuscade being laid.

The only elevation of the ground within the peninsula at that time must have been the barrier at its entrance, and possibly some earthworks thrown up on the river's bank to protect the road to the ford. It would seem that a thread laid upon the map from the Roman road in Ha) dock Park, past the New Hey farm in Winwick, the Green Lane, at Longford, and the corner of Orsord Avenue, would pass by Howley Lane, not far from the church, near v/hich the few fragments of Roman pottery, one of them " first," or very early Roman figured, and described by Dr. Kendrick, were found, and would then debouch on the north bank of the river, near to the entrance of the peninsula.0 * Dr. Kendrick's Excavations at the Mote Hill, p. 7. After what has been said, we shall be better prepared to fix the place where the ford over the river was formerly placed.

Never in modern times, or within living memory, have there been more than two entrances into the peninsula from the Latchford side. One of these now forms the approach to the lodge of the Old Warps Hall, and the other is at the end of Brook Place, and nearly opposite to the Wash Lane. The north bank of the river opposite the first of these entrances must have been too high, and the stream there too deep to be forded, and the entrance, moreover, debouches opposite those low-lying meadows which stretch away from Latchford to Wilders pool, and any road leading across them to that place would be liable to be often interrupted by floods. But near the second entrance the river was shallower, had less depth of water, and the ford came out nearer to the high land, which was more easy to cross by a safe road, although when a deep cutting was made across Brook Place for a sewer, no traces of an ancient road were discovered.* Yet tradition has long made this into the old line of road, and though no traces of the Roman work any longer remain on it, it was probably by it that the legions crossed the Mersey, and marched and countermarched between the provinces of Flavia and Maxima.

In October, 1848, when the Wilderspool Causeway was to be raised, and the bridge repaired, a good opportunity was afforded to examine both. It was then very clear, from a former pavement being discovered on the level of * On 24th April, 1865, a deep trench cutting was made across the road from the river to the end of Wash Lane, but there were no signs of a pavement. There was some shifted material which the workmen said might ha.ve been an old road, but if so it did not come in a straight line, but diagonally to the Wash Lane. the fields below, that the causeway and the bridge had both been raised more than once before, and that the bridge had been originally only half its present width, from which it would seem that there had been a rise of three or more feet in the bed of the river since the time of James I., when the causeway, though not perhaps the bridge, was first made.

Below this bridge the brook originally formed a wide creek. The workmen of the Water Works Company in laying their pipes across the next field to the brook at Wilderspool, on the 4th May, 1857, cut through a stratum of material which the late Dr. Robson, who saw it, thought was the Roman road. It lay six or eight feet below the surface of the field, and it was also below the present level of the river at low water, which is a further proof of the bed of the river having risen. Upon the whole we are left in doubt what was the exact course which the road took from the ford over the Mersey to the station at Wilderspool, though it seems most probable that it kept the line of the high ground in Latchford, and passed the building of which the foundations were discovered by Richard Wright, and which he conjectured to have been a lighthouse.* * For information as to the Warrington and Northwich road, and other highways in Latchford, see Palatine Note Book for August, 1884, p. 132, and for January, 1885, p. 235, where an Inquisition of 1354, with a translation, is given at length, together with a plan of the roads as there described.

Chapter III

After the Romans left our shores, early in the fifth century, and their legions were no longer seen passing and repassing over the Mersey (Belisama) by the ford at Latchford, a dark age of five centuries seems to have come on, during which neither history nor tradition has told us anything of the irruptions and ravages to which, in that interval, the place was subjected, or even who were the enemies who committed them. And this is the more strange since in the year 920 King Edward the elder found it necessary to garrison and fortify the adjoining town of Thelwall, to secure his Saxon subjects and repel the encroachments of the Northmen and others,* and about the same time, according to Simeon of Durham, he also repaired Mameceaster (Manchester) "beyond the river of Mercia." But it was still later, and not until the year 1002, when the Saxon Wulfric endowed the monastery of Burton with his lands between Ribble and " Marse," that we find our noble river first appearing under its modern name,f and we must descend the stream of time still further before we meet with any mention of Latchford by its present or any other name. * Saxon Chronicle. t Thorpe's Dipiomatarium Anglicum, p. 543.

By the order of William the Conqueror, commissioners were sent into every shire to inquire upon the oaths of the sheriffs and others into the name of every place, who held it in the time of the Confessor, who was the present possessor, how many hides there were in the manor, how many carucates in the demesne, how many homagers, how many villeins, how many cotarii, how many servi, what freemen, how many tenants in socage, what quantity of wood, how much meadow and pasture, what mills and fish ponds, how much had been added or taken away, what was the gross value in King Edward's time, what the present value, and how much each freeman or sochmaan had then or before. In the year 1086 the commissioners completed their survey, made their return to it, and this forms the record now called the Domesday Survey.

In that most valuable record, though Latchford finds no place by name, it is undoubtedly meant to be included under Grappenhall, of which parish it formed then, as it still forms, an integral part. This is the description of Grappenhall as given in the survey, to which a translation, with an explanation of some of its terms, is subjoined : — ■ " Osbernus tenet Gropenhale et Edwardus de eo. Ipse et Dot pro ii. maneriis tenuerunt et liberi homines fuerunt. Ibi i. hida et dimidia virgata terræ geldabilis. Terra est ii. carucatæ. In dominio est una et dimidia et ii. servi et unus villanus, et iii. bordarii. Silva ibi i. leuva longa et xl. perticis lata. Ibi ii. haiæ. Tempore Regis Edwardi valebat v. solidos. Modo vi. solidos. Wasti suit." " Osbern (Fitz Tezzon) holds Gropenhale and Edward of him.

He and Dot, both freemen, held it as two manors. There is one hide and half a virgat of land ratable to c the gelt. The land is two carucates, one and a half of which are in the demesne ; and there are two serfs * and one villein and three bordars. There is a wood, one league long and forty perches broad. There are two hays. Its value in King Edward's time was five shillings [a year] ; it is now worth six shillings. When it came to the Earl of Chester it was waste." Edward and Dot, the two freemen who held, the one Grappenhall and the other Latchford— each a mesne manor under Osbern fitz Tezzon, the lord paramount — are both said to be freemen (liberi homines), a term which included a very extensive class. It meant all that were not in bondage, which of course included men of a great variety of ranks, from the lowest freeholder or homager of a manor, through all the inter vening ranks up to an earl, or even still higher distinctions.

The freemen were neither outlaws nor infamous nor ■excommunicated persons. They were entitled to sit on juries and inquests, and when impannelled were entitled to be addressed by the officer of the Crown as " You good men and true." At the time of the Domesday Survey, as Kelham informs us, "the ordinary freemen were under «ome great man's protection, but what their quality was, further than that their blood and their persons were free, that is, that they were not nativi or born thralls, it will give a knowing man trouble to discover."! Edward and Dot were homagers to Osbern fitz Tezzon, * The similarity in sound between the words cerf and serf led to a serious mistake during the first French revolution, when a nobleman, having commanded all his cerfs to be killed, was charged with having hid the barbarity to command all his serfs to be butchered. t Domesday Book Illustrated, 254, and each of them was a freeman even according to Kelham's definition.

The serfs {servi) upon Edward and Dot's lands were in a condition the very opposite to their m asters. They were persons who, or whose parents, by the means which Tacitus speaks of in his account of •our German ancestors, had suffered the loss of their liberty, and had reduced themselves and their children to bondage. They might hold land, but it was not necessary to their condition, and if they held it they held it only at their lord's will. The villein, " tho' very meanly descended, yet comes of a very ancient house," but in this case long descent did not gentle his condition. " The tenant of land in villenage shall do whatever he is commanded, nor shall he know in the evening what he is to do on the morrow, but shall always be at an uncertainty."* The bordars seem to have been persons who had small holdings of lands for which they paid rent in poultry, eggs, and other small articles for their lord's table.t A word or two about the tax of Dane-gelt, to which the lands in Grappenhall and Latchford, and almost every where else, were subject.

In the year 991, King Ethelred, to subsidise the Danes, imposed an obnoxious tax, which in allusion to its origin was ever afterwards called the Dane-gelt. This tax, which found no favour either with the Witan or the people, but was submitted to from necessity, was threepence for each bovate, which as there were eight bovates to every hide, and a hide was worth twenty shillings, was equivalent to two shillings a hide, or a ten per cent, land tax. In the wood, which is described as occupying so large a * Bracton. t Introd. to the Domesday Survey, portion of the Grappenhall district, there was doubtless a* large quantity of the winged and four-footed game. And amongst the latter there might be some of those sallow deer which, though not indigenous, had then, some time before, been introduced into England ; but Edward and Dot were rather coveters of game than lovers of the sport, for the hays which are mentioned were enclosures made in the wood, into which the four-footed game were driven, to be there either pulled down by hounds or shot to death with arrows, which must be thought an unsportsmanlike proceeding.