History of the Fylde of Lancashire

by John Porter

and deprived of their armed soldiers and valiant youth, were panic stricken by the fierce onslaughts of the Scottish tribes, and fled before their advancing arms. Some idea of the critical and truly pitiable condition to which they were reduced may be gleaned from the tenor of an appeal for help sent by them to their old rulers, which the author last quoted has preserved as follows:—

The Lamentation of the Britons unto Agitius, thrice Consul.

“The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Thus of two kinds of death, one or other must be our choice, either to be swallowed up by the waves or butchered by the sword.”

The Romans were fully occupied with enemies of their own, the Goths, and consequently were unprepared to offer any assistance to the Britons, whose position was shortly afterwards rendered additionally wretched by famine and its attendant evils. At that period both the state of Lancashire itself and of its inhabitants must have been exceedingly deplorable—the country ravaged and still exposed to the depredations and barbarities of the enemy, had now become a prey to a fearful dearth. Many of the descendants of the old Setantii, unable any further to support the double contest, yielded themselves up to the Picts and Scots in the hope of obtaining food to appease the fierce cravings of hunger, whilst others, more hardy, but outnumbered and weakened by long fasts, sought refuge in the woods and such other shelters as the neighbourhood afforded. Disappointed in the Romans, the Britons applied for aid to the Saxons, or Anglo-Saxons, a mixed and piratical tribe, dwelling on the banks of the German Ocean, and composed of Jutes, Angles, and pure Saxons. The men of this race are described as determined, fearless, and of great size, with blue eyes, ruddy complexions, and yellow streaming hair. They were well practised in warfare, and armed with battle-axes, swords, spears, and maces. Their chief god was Odin, or Woden, and their heaven Valhalla. About one thousand of these warriors, under the command of Hengist and Horsa, embarked in three vessels, built of hides, and called Cyulæ or Ceols. They landed on the coast of Kent, about the year 449, and by the direction of Vortigern, king of the Island, marched northwards until they arrived near York, where an encounter of great moment took place, terminating in the utter defeat of the Picts and Scots. Inspirited by so early and signal a success the Saxons followed up their advantage with alacrity, drove the baleful marauders out of the counties of Lancaster and York, and finally compelled them to retreat across the frontier into their own territory. After having rescued the kingdom from these invaders the Saxons settled at York and Manchester, and not only evinced no sign of returning to their own country, but even despatched messengers for fresh troops. This strange and suspicious conduct on the part of their allies excited considerable alarm and anxiety amongst the Britons, who practically expressed their disapproval by refusing to make any provision for the reinforcements. After a short interval a mandate was issued to the Saxon leader ordering him to withdraw his army from the soil of Britain. Incensed and stimulated by such decisive action Hengist determined at once to carry out the object he had cherished from the first—the subjugation of the people and the seizure of the island. Having procured a further supply of men under his son Octa, he established them in the country of the Brigantes, and almost immediately invited the native nobles to a friendly conference with his chiefs on Salisbury plain. The Britons, who were far from suspecting his treacherous design, attended the assembly unarmed, and in that defenceless state fell an easy prey to their Saxon hosts, who in the midst of feasting and revelry, brutally massacred the whole of their guests. Successful in his cowardly and murderous stratagem, Hengist took possession of the southern counties, whilst his son Octa maintained his sway over the Brigantine province of Northumbria, in which the Fylde was included, as intimated at the beginning of the chapter.

The ancient warlike spirit of the Setantii, which had lain almost dormant for centuries, was once more thoroughly aroused in the natives of Lancashire, and a determined and valiant opposition offered by them to Octa and his army. Overborough capitulated only when its inhabitants were worn out by fatigue and famine, whilst Warrington and Manchester sustained severe and protracted sieges before they fell into the hands of the enemy. Nennius, another early historian, who was born towards the end of the sixth century, informs us that the famous King Arthur and his sixty Knights of the Round Table worsted the Saxons in twelve successive battles, four of which were fought on the banks of the Douglas, near Wigan. 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. Clusters of Saxon huts, soon growing into villages, now sprang up on the soil of the Fylde, which under the wood-levelling and marsh-draining Romans had lost much of its swampy and forest characters and been transformed into a more habitable locality. We need have little hesitation in conjecturing that the valour displayed by the inhabitants of our county was greatly increased, and often rendered almost desperate, by the knowledge that if their land were subdued and occupied by the Saxons the key, if it may so be called, to their mountainous strongholds would be lost, and the line of communication between them impassably and irretrievably obstructed; for the venerable Bede[8] tells us that a portion of the Britons fled to the hills and fells of Furness, and we are aware that a much larger share sought refuge amongst the mountains of Wales, lying to the south-west, and visible from the shores of the Fylde. Others escaped over to Armorica in France, and from them it acquired the name of Brittany. Additional evidence that Furness was peopled by the Britons, even for more than two centuries after the arrival of the Saxons, is to be found in the writings of Camden, who says:—“The Britons in Furness lived securely for a long time, relying upon those fortifications, wherewith nature had guarded them; for that the Britons lived here in the 228th year after the coming of the Saxons, is plain from hence; that at that time Egfrid, the king of the Northumbrians, gave to St. Cuthbert the land called Cartmell, and all the Britons in it; for so it is related in his life.”

The Saxons were great idolaters, and soon crowded the country with their temples and images. The deities they worshipped have furnished us with names for the different days of the week, thus Sunday is derived from Sunan the sun, Monday from Monan the moon, Tuesday from Tuisco a German god, Wednesday from Woden, Thursday from Thor or Thur, Friday from Friga, and Saturday from Seater.

When the nation was once more at peace, all the towns and castles which had been damaged during the wars were repaired, and others, which had been destroyed, rebuilt. The Britons were brought by degrees to look with less disfavour on their conquerors, and as time progressed adopted their heathenish faith and offered up prayer at the shrines of the same idols, drifting back into darkness and forgetting or ignoring those true doctrines which, it is said, had been declared and expounded to them at the very commencement of the Christian era. According to Clemens Romanus and Theodoret, the Apostle Paul was one of the earliest preachers of the Gospel in Britain, but whatever amount of truth there may be in this statement, it is certain that at the Council of Arles in A.D. 314, and ten years later at that of Nicene, three British bishops were present. All traces of their former religion quickly vanished from amongst the native population of Lancashire under the pagan influence of their rulers; and it was during that unhallowed age that Gregory, surnamed the Great, and afterwards pontiff, being attracted by the handsome appearance of some youths exposed for sale in the market-place at Rome, and finding, on inquiry, that they came from the kingdom of Deira, in Britain, determined to send over Augustine and Paulinus to Christianise the inhabitants. In 596 Augustine landed with forty missionaries on the coast of Kent, the king became a convert, and the new faith spread rapidly throughout the island. Thousands were baptised by Paulinus in the river Swale, then called the Northumbrian Jordan, and the waters of Ribble were also resorted to for the performance of similar ceremonies.

The advent of the Roman mission initiated a fresh epoch in the ecclesiastical history of the county, monasteries and religious houses sprang up in different parts, and at the consecration of the church and monastery of Ripon, lands bordering on the Ribble, in Hacmundernesse (Amounderness), in Gedene, and in Duninge were presented amongst other gifts to that foundation. Paulinus was created bishop of Northumbria in 627, and it is to his ministrations and pious example that the conversion of the inhabitants of the Fylde and vicinal territory is generally attributed. The Saxon Chronicle records, however, that in 565 Columba “came from Scotia (Ireland) to preach to the Picts.” Columba was born at Garten, a village in county Donegal, and according to Selden and other learned writers, the religion professed by him and the Culdees, as the priests of his order were called, was strictly Presbyterian. Bede writes:—“They preached only such works of charity and piety as they could learn from prophetical, evangelical, and apostolic writings.” Columba established a monastery at Iona. Dr. Giles states that “the ancient name of Iona was I or Hi, or Aoi, which was Latinised into Hyona, or Iona; the common name of it now is I-colum-kill, the Island of Colum of the Cells.” Bishop Turner affirms that “the lands in Amounderness, on the Ribble,” were first presented to a Culdee abbot, named Eata, on the erection of a monastery at Ripon, but that before the building was finished he was dismissed and St. Wilfred made abbot of Ripon, sometime before 661. If the foregoing assertion be correct there is certain evidence that the Culdee doctrines were also promulgated in Lancashire, and doubtless in our own district, at that early date. Bede seems to support such an assumption when he states that the Ripon lands were originally granted to those who professed the creed of the Picts to build a monastery upon, and did not pass to St. Wilfred, bishop of Northumbria, until afterwards, in 705, when he re-edified the monastery. Whatever discrepancies may exist as to the exact period and manner in which Christianity was introduced or revived in the bosoms of our forefathers, there is ample and reliable proof that the majority of them had embraced the true faith about the middle of the seventh century, when churches were probably erected in the hamlets of Kirkham and St. Michael’s-on-Wyre.

About the year 936 the Hundred of Amounderness was granted by Athelstan to the See of York:—“I, Athelstan, king of the Angles, etc., freely give to the Omnipotent God, and to the blessed Apostle Peter, at his church in the diocese of York, a certain section of land, not small in extent, in the place which the inhabitants call Amounderness,” etc. The Hundred of Amounderness when this grant was made must have been pretty thickly peopled, for Athelstan states that he “purchased it at no small price,” and land at that date was valued chiefly by the number of its residents. Here it will be convenient to observe that in some instances, as in that of Amounderness, the Hundreds acquired the additional titles of Wapentakes, and, in explanation of the origin of the term, we learn from “Thoresby Ducat Leodiens,” that when a person received the government of a Wapentake, he was met, at the appointed time and usual place, by the elder portion of the inhabitants, and, after dismounting from his horse, he held up his spear and took a pledge of fealty from all according to the usual custom. Whoever came touched his spear with theirs, and by such contact of arms they were confirmed in one common interest. So from wœpnu, a weapon, and tac, a touch, or taccare, to confirm, the Hundreds were called Wapentakes. Traces of the above antique ceremony are still to be met with in the peculiar form of expression used when the tenantry and others are summoned by the manorial lords of Amounderness to attend their court-barons and court-leets.