The History of Oswestry / Comprising the British, Saxon, Norman, and English eras; the topography of the borough; and its ecclesiastical and civic history; with notices of botany, geology, statistics, angling, and biography: to which are added sketches of the environs

by William Cathrall

KNOCKIN.

We briefly notice this place, from its antiquity, and having possessed a castle, erected in the reign of Henry II. Knockin is in the hundred of Oswestry, as already stated; is a rectory discharged, in the diocese of St. Asaph, and the deanery of Marchia. It is situated five and a half miles south-east of Oswestry. The origin of the name is not known. There is no mention of it in Domesday Book, nor in any of the British Chronicles before the Conquest. Camden refers to it but with brevity. The castle was built by Lord L’Estrange, the first of whose family was Guy L’Estrange (Guido Extraneous,) a younger son of the Duke of Bretagne. He had three sons, Guy, Hamon, and John, all of whom held lands in Shropshire by gift from Henry II. The younger Guy was Sheriff of Salop from the sixth to the eleventh of Henry II.; and again from the seventeenth to the twenty-first of Henry II., Ralph, his son, gave (the first of Richard II.) the chapel of Knockin to the canons of Haughmond. He left no issue, and his three sisters became his co-heiresses. John, grandson of Guy, in the thirty-third of Henry III., procured a market for the town on a Tuesday, and a fair on the eve-day and day after the anniversary of the decollation of St. John the Baptist. Madog, who was at the head of an insurrection against the king’s officers in North Wales, marched against the Lord Strange, and defeated him at Knockin. The male line of the family failed in John Le Strange, who died in the seventeenth of Edward IV., leaving an only daughter, Joan, who married George, son and heir of Thomas Stanley, who was created Earl of Derby by Henry VII. The castle was first demolished in the civil wars in the reign of King John, and repaired by John Le Strange in the third of Henry III. The title of Knockin is still kept up, though the family is extinct, the eldest son in the Derby family being styled Lord Strange. The castle was long since a heap of ruins, and scarcely a vestige of it remains to be seen. The materials of which it was composed were worked up to build the church-walls, &c.; and, “tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon!” cart-loads of the stones were carried away to repair the roads! The Poor-rate return for the parish gives the following statements:—Acreage, 1,384; gross rental, £2,131; rateable value assessed to the relief of the poor, £1,916.