History of the Fylde of Lancashire

by John Porter

The following notice of Singleton in the time of Henry, duke of Lancaster, who died in 1361, occurs amongst the Lansdowne manuscripts:—

“In Syngleton there are 21 messuages and 26 bovates of land held by bondsmen, who pay annually at the feasts of Easter and St. Michael £21 9s. 3d. And there are 11 cottages with so many inclosures, and one croft, and one piece of land in the hands of tenants-at-will, paying annually 21s. 6d. All the aforesaid bondsmen owe talliage, and give marchet and heriot,[190] and on the death of her husband a widow gives one third part of his property to the lord of the manor, but more is claimed in cases where the deceased happen to be widowers. And if any one possesses a male fowl it is forbidden to him to sell it without a license. The duke of Lancaster owns the aforesaid tenements with right to hold a court. It is to be noted that each of the above mentioned bovates of land is to pay at first 2s. 7d. per annum, with work at the plough and harrow, mowing meadows in Ryggeby, and carrying elsewhere the lord’s provisions at Richmond, York, Doncaster, Pontefract, and Newcastle, with 12 horses in Summer and Winter. But afterwards the land was freed from this bondage, and paid per bovate 14s. 3d. ob.”

The lands of Thomas Banastre, before named, in “Syngleton Parva, Ethelswyk, Frekulton, Hamylton, Stalmyn,” etc., were escheated to John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, in 1385, after the death of Banastre.[191]

Edmund Dudley, who was attainted in 1509 and afterwards executed, held Little Singleton, as well as lands in Elswick, Thornton, Wood Plumpton, Freckleton, etc.;[192] and in 1521 Thomas, earl of Derby, held the manor of Syngleton of Henry VIII.[193]

In the reign of James I. Great Singleton appears to have belonged to the crown, for amongst a number of estates purchased from the crown by Edward Badbie and William Weldon, of London, for the sum of £2,000, is the “manor or lordship of Singleton, alias Singleton Magna,” the annual rent of which is stated to have been £16 17s. 0d. Subsequently the manor passed to the Fanshaws, and from them to the Shaws; William Cunliffe Shaw, of Preston, esq., sold it to Joseph Hornby, of Ribby Hall, esq., and afterwards it was purchased by Thomas Miller, esq., of Preston, who greatly improved the property by draining the low lying lands known as Singleton Carrs, which in former days were frequently in a state of partial or complete inundation. Thomas H. Miller, esq., the present owner and eldest son of the late Thos. Miller, esq., has recently erected a noble mansion on the estate, where he resides during most of the year.

The earliest notice to be discovered of Singleton Grange is in an old schedule of deeds, in which the land is mentioned as having been granted by King John in 1215. In 1297, during the reign of Edward I., Edmund Crouchback, earl of Lancaster, received yearly the sum of 20s. from the estate. Subsequently the Grange passed into the possession of the abbot and convent of Cockersand;[194] and at the dissolution of monasteries it became the property of Henry VIII., who in 1543 granted it to William Eccleston, of Eccleston, gentleman.[195] The Grange descended to Thomas, the son, and afterwards to Adam, the grandson, of William Eccleston. Adam Eccleston died sometime a little later than 1597. The estate after his decease passed through several hands in rapid succession, and in 1614 was sold by William Ireland, gent., to William Leigh, B.D., clerk in holy orders and rector of Standish. Theophilus Leigh, the eldest son of that gentleman, resided at Singleton Grange, and married Clare, daughter of Thomas Brooke, of Norton, Cheshire, by whom he had one son, named William. William Leigh succeeded to the Grange on the death of his father in 1658, and espoused Margaret, daughter of Edward Chisenhall, of Chisenhall, Lancashire, and had issue, Charles and Edward.

Charles Leigh, the elder of the two sons, became celebrated as a physician and student of natural history and antiquities. He was born at the Grange in 1662, and at the age of 21 graduated as B.A. at the University of Oxford; afterwards he removed to Cambridge to study medicine, and in 1690 obtained the degree of M.D. In 1685 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He married Dorothy, daughter of Edward Shuttleworth, of Larbrick, and practised as a physician both in London and in the neighbourhood of his birthplace, on one occasion, according to his own version, performing a wonderful cure on Alexander Rigby, of Layton Hall. His published works were—Physiologia Lancastriensis, in 1691, and the Natural History of Lancashire, Cheshire, and the Peak of Derbyshire, with an account of the British, Phœnician, Armenian, Greek, and Roman Antiquities in those parts, in 1700, of which latter Dr. Whittaker remarks:—“Had this doctor filled his whole book, as he has done nearly one-half of it, with medical cases, it might have been of some use; but how, with all possible allowances for the blindness and self-partiality of human nature, a man should have thought himself qualified to write and to publish critical remarks on a subject of which he understood not the elementary principles, it is really difficult to conceive.”[196]

Somewhere before the commencement of the eighteenth century, the estate of Bankfield was separated from the Grange, which, during the latter portion, at least, of the lifetime of Dr. Leigh, who died shortly after the publication of his “Natural History,” was held by a person named Joseph Green. In 1701 the executors of Joseph Green sold a portion of Singleton Grange to Richard Harrison, of Bankfield, yeoman. The remainder of the Grange land was held by widow Green until her death, when it passed by her will, dated 1716, to her two sons, Richard and Paul Green.[197]

Richard Harrison, of Bankfield, obtained the whole of Singleton Grange in 1738, and left it on his decease to his son Richard, from whom it descended about 1836 to his only surviving child, Agnes Elizabeth, the wife of Edwards Atkinson, of Fleetwood, justice of the peace for the county of Lancaster. Mrs. Atkinson died childless in 1850, and bequeathed Singleton Grange to her husband, who in his turn entailed the estate upon his eldest son, Charles Edward Dyson Atkinson, still a minor, the offspring of a second marriage, with Anne, daughter of Christopher Thornton Clark, of Cross Hall, Lancashire, by whom he had issue two sons and a daughter,—Ann Elizabeth Ynocensia, John Henry Gladstone, and the present heir. The old Hall of Singleton Grange has been modernised and converted into a farm-house.