In 1268 the Honor of Lancaster, the Wapentake of Amounderness, and the manors of Preston, Ribby-with-Wray, and Singleton were given by Henry III. to his son Edmund Crouchback, and in addition the king published an edict forbidding the sheriffs of neighbouring counties to enter themselves, or send, or permit their bailiffs to enter or interfere with anything belonging to the Honor of Lancaster, or to the men of that Honor, unless required to do so by his son. Edmund was also created earl of Lancaster, and became the founder of that noble house, whose possessions and power afterwards attained to such magnitude as to place its representative, Henry IV., upon the throne, although nearer descendants of his grandfather Edward III. were still living.
We have now arrived at the unsettled era, comprising the reigns of the three Edwards and Richard II., and during the whole of the time these monarchs wore the crown, a period of one hundred and twenty-six years, the nation was engaged in continual wars—with the Welsh under Llewellyn, the Scotch under Bruce and Wallace, and the French under Philip. The reign of Richard II. was additionally agitated by the insurrection of Wat Tyler. Looking at that long uninterrupted season of excitement, we cease to wonder at the riotous and disorganized state into which society was thrown. The rulers, whether local and subordinate, or those of a higher grade, were too actively engaged in forwarding the efficiency of the army, to devote much attention to the welfare and proper government of the people. Crimes and disturbances were allowed to pass unpunished, and evil-doers, being thus encouraged to prosecute their unlawful purposes, carried their outrages to the very confines of open rebellion against all power and order. It was not until such a dangerous climax had been reached that a commission, consisting of the following judges, Peter de Bradbate, Edmund Deyncourt, William de Vavasour, John de Island, and Adam de Middleton, was appointed to deal summarily and severely with all offenders in the counties of Lancaster and Westmoreland. During those troublesome times Sir Adam Banastre and a number of others assaulted Ralph de Truno, prior of Lancaster, and his train of attendants at Poulton-le-Fylde, seized and carried him off to Thornton, where they brutally ill-used and finally imprisoned him. An inquiry into the disgraceful proceeding was instituted by order of Edward I., but the result has not been preserved, at least no record of it has as yet been discovered amongst any of the ancient documents concerning this county. Leyland, who was antiquary to Henry VIII., alluding to the death of the disorderly knight, says,—“Adam Banastre, a bachelar of Lancastershire, moved ryot agayne Thomas of Lancaster by kraft of kynge Edward II., but he was taken and behedid by the commandment of Thomas of Lancaster.” The first part of the quotation has reference to a quarrel between the earl of Lancaster and Sir Adam, who for his own aggrandizement and to curry favour with the king, as well as to divert the attention of that monarch from his own misdeeds, declared that Thomas of Lancaster wished to interfere with the royal prerogative in the choice of ministers; and, professedly, to punish such presumption he invaded the domains of that nobleman. An encounter took place in the valley of the Ribble, not far from Preston, in which the followers of Sir Adam were vanquished and put to flight. Their leader secreted himself in a barn on his own lands, but, being discovered by the soldiers of his opponent, was dragged forth and beheaded with a sword. Subjoined is an account of a disturbance which occurred at Kirkham during the same period, transcribed from the Vale Royal[26] register:—“A narrative of proceedings in a dispute between the abbot of Vale Royal, and Sir Will. de Clifton, knt., respecting the tithes in the manor of Clifton and Westby, in the parish of Kirkham, A.D. 1337, in the time of Peter’s abbacy. The charges alleged against Sir William state, that he had obtained twenty marks[27] due to the abbot; had forcibly obstructed the rector in the gathering of tithes within the manor of Clifton and Westby; seized his loaded wain, and brought ridicule on his palfrey: that he had also burst, with his armed retainers, into the parish church of Kirkham, and thereby deterred his clerks from the performance of divine service; had prevented the parishioners from resorting to the font for the rite of baptism; and that, having seized on Thomas, the clerk of the abbot of Vale Royal, he had inflicted on him a flagellation in the public streets of Preston. After a complaint, made to the abbot of Westminster, a conservator of the rights and privileges of the order to which Vale Royal belonged, Sir William confessed his fault and threw himself on the mercy of the abbot of the Cheshire convent, who contented himself, after receiving a compensation for his rector’s losses, with an oath from the refractory knight, that he would in future maintain and defend the privileges of the abbey, and would bind himself in forty shillings to offer no further violence to the unfortunate secretary of the abbot.”
During the reign of Edward III., Henry, earl of Lancaster, was created duke of the county with the consent of the prelates and peers assembled in parliament. This nobleman, whose pious and generous actions earned for him the title of the “Good duke of Lancaster,” received a mandate from the king during the war with France, when there were serious apprehensions of an invasion by that nation, to arm all the lancers on his estates, and to set a strict watch over the seacoasts of Lancashire. These precautions, however, proved unnecessary, as the French made no attempt to cross the channel. In his will, bearing the date 1361, (the year of his death), Duke Henry bequeathed the Wappentakes or Hundreds of Amounderness, Lonsdale, and Leyland, with other estates, to his daughter Blanche, who had married John of Gaunt, the earl of Richmond and fourth son of Edward III. John of Gaunt succeeded to the dukedom in right of his wife.
“In the ‘Testa de Nevill’,” a register extending from 1274 to 1327, and containing, amongst other matters, a list of the fees and serjeanties holden of the king and the churches in his gift, it is stated under the latter heading:—“St. Michael upon Wyre; the son of Count Salvata had it by gift of the present king, and he says, that he is elected into a bishoprick, and that the church is vacant, and worth 30 marks[28] per an. Kyrkeham; King John gave two parts of it to Simon Blundel, on account of his custody of the son and heir of Theobald Walter. Worth 80 marks[29] per an.” In another part of these records it is named that Richard de Frekelton held fees in chief in Freckleton, Newton, and Eccleston; Alan de Singilton, in Singleton, Freckleton, Newton, and Elswick; and Adam de Merton, in Marton; also that Fitz Richard held serjeanties in Singleton, by serjeanty of Amounderness.
The earliest intimation of members being returned to represent our own district, in conjunction with the other divisions of the county, is to the parliament of Edward I., assembled in 1295, when Matthew de Redmand and John de Ewyas were elected knights of the shire for Lancaster, and in his report the sheriff adds—“There is no city in the county of Lancaster.” The members of parliament in 1297 were Henricus de Kigheley and Henricus le Botyler; in 1302 Willielmus de Clifton and Gilbertus de Singleton; and in 1304 Willielmus de Clifton and Willielmus Banastre. Henricus le Botyler, or Butler, belonged to the family of the Butlers of Rawcliffe; Gilbertus de Singleton was probably connected with the Singletons whose descendants resided at Staining Hall; Willielmus de Clifton was an ancestor of the Cliftons of Lytham, and here it may be stated that Lancashire was represented in 1383 by Robt. de Clifton, of Westby, and Ric’us de Hoghton; and in 1844 by J. Wilson Patten, now Lord Winmarleigh, and Jno. Talbot Clifton, esq., of Lytham Hall. Thos. Henry Clifton, esq., son of the last gentleman, and the Hon. F. A. Stanley are the present members for North Lancashire.
During the Scottish wars of Edward III., John de Coupland, of Upper Rawcliffe, valiantly captured David II., king of Scotland, at the battle of Durham, and although that monarch dashed out Coupland’s teeth and used every means to incite the latter to slay him, the brave soldier restrained his wrath and delivered up his prisoner alive. For that signal service Edward rewarded him with a grant of £500 per annum, until he could receive an equivalent in land wherever he might choose, and created him a knight banneret.[30] “I have seen,” says Camden, “a charter of King Edward III., by which he advanced John Coupland to the state of a banneret in the following words, because in a battle fought at Durham he had taken prisoner David the Second, King of Scots:—‘Being willing to reward the said John, who took David de Bruis prisoner, and frankly delivered him unto us, for the deserts of his honest and valiant service, in such sort as others may take example by his precedent to do us faithful service in time to come, we have promoted the said John to the place and degree of a banneret; and, for the maintenance of the same state, we have granted, for us and our heirs, to the same John, five hundred pounds by the year, to be received by him and his heirs’,” etc.
For some time after a truce had been concluded with Scotland, the war, in which the incident narrated occurred, continued with little abatement, and in 1322 this county with others was called upon to raise fresh levies. 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. Further evidence of the poverty of this division may be gathered from a census taken in 1377, which states, amongst other things, that—“There is no town worthy of notice anywhere in the whole of the county”; and again, twenty years later, when a loan was raised to meet the enormous expenditure of the country, Lancashire furnished no contributors.
In 1389, during the reign of Richard II., it was enacted, with a view to the preservation and improvement of the salmon fisheries throughout the kingdom, “that no young salmon be taken or destroyed by nets, at mill-dams or other places, from the middle of April to the Nativity of St. John Baptist”; and special reference is made to this neighbourhood in the following sentence of the bill:—“It is ordained and assented, that the waters of Lone, Wyre, Mersee, Ribbyl, and all other waters in the county of Lancaster, be put in defence, as to the taking of Salmons, from Michaelmas Day to the Purification of our Lady (2nd of February), and in no other time of the year, because that salmons be not seasonable in the said waters in the time aforesaid; and in the parts where such rivers be, there shall be assigned and sworn good and sufficient conservators of this statute.” The foregoing is the earliest regulation of the kind, and the wisdom and utility of its provisions are evinced by the existence of similar measures at the present day.
From the annals of the Duchy may be learnt some interesting particulars relative to changes in ownership at that period of certain portions of the territory comprised in the Fylde. In 1380 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, issued a “precept to the Escheator to give seisin of the Lands of William Botyler in Layton Magna, Layton Parva, Bispham, Warthebrek, and Great Merton,” etc.; and shortly afterwards gave orders to “seize the Lands of William Botyler.” In 1385 mandates were issued by the same nobleman to his Escheator to “seize into the Hands of the King and himself the Lands of Thomas Banastre, (deceased, 1384), in Ethelswyk, Frekculton, Claughton in Amoundernes, Syngleton Parva, Hamylton, Stalmyn,” etc.; also those of “Emund Banastre, (deceased, 1384), in Wodeplumpton, Preston,” etc. In the Rolls the subjoined entries also occur:—