The Normans and Plantagenets
The land around here was mainly moor and woodland, separated from the rest of the country by the River Mersey to the south, the Pennine range to the east and areas of effectively impenetrable “moss”, and the people were probably living a pastoral lifestyle, raising milch cows for milk and, most importantly, cheese.
It seems that the mainstay of the local economy would have been cattle driving centred upon ranch-like farms known in Norman times as “vaccaries”, which were probably in the ownership of royalty of the local baron class.
Doubtless, as ever, Lancashire would have appeared “backward” and rustic compared to many other parts of the country. The population would have been mainly simple farmers of Celtic, Anglian or Norse stock, ekeing a meagre living from the wonderful green lands around – the wonderful green lands not covered by ancient woodlands that is. This was not much land at all.
Consequently, the area was not successfully subdued by the Normans until 1070, four years after the disaster at Battle, near Hastings.
Bowland at this time, it is said, was comparitively well peopled, although William the Conqueror’s “Harrowing of the North” soon rectified this, by the age old method of brutality and genocide.
This area was part of what was known as “Christ’s Croft”, i.e. all of the lands in Lancashire between the Mersey and the Ribble.
Most references to the area are in the general form of the Hundred of Blackburnshire.
A “hundred” comprised of a hundred Anglo-Saxon tuns or vills. Each of these settlements probably had a manorial lord or “franklin”, including Witton, and Pleasington, Hoghton and numerous other ancient settlements. By Tudor times, the term franklin had passed out of use, its function being usurped by the “yeoman”, a farmer of comfortable means.
Blackburnshire was granted to Roger of Poictou, although his intrigues led to his forfeiting it in favour of the De Lacy family. The first Normans to come to the area were those under Gilbert de Lacy, who expelled the Saxon owners, including, no doubt, Leofwin of Pleasington. The de Lacy family still maintain an association with Lancashire.
The first Norman Lord of Blackburn Manor was Gamaliel de Blackburn. He was followed by Gilbert, John and Henry, mentioned about 1160. This eventually came in part to the Feildens, after the purchase of a third by Henry Feilden in 1721.
Later, the Plantagenet family, providing an unbroken line (well, more of a web actually) of monarchs between 1152 and 1485, had a mansion at Ightenhill near Burnley.
It has since been rased.
Around the year 1347, John Lyndelay, Abbot of Whalley, took it upon himself to write an account of the area, cited as “De Statu Blagborneshire“. One of his main concerns is the founding of his own religious institution, Whalley Abbey, on the 12th June 1296.
During the Wars of the Roses, this area was, in all probability, staunchly Lancastrian territory in sentiments. However, a number of the gentry and peasentry will have been loyal to the first Yorkist king, Edward IV (reigned 1461-70, 1471-83).
This is proven by a most melancholy incident, in the aftermath of the battle of Hexham. The deposed Lancastrian monarch Henry VI, pious and chaste as a man, but ineffectual as a king, sought refuge in the area, first at Bolton Hall, home of Sir Ralph Pudsey, just over the Yorkshire border.
From here, he moved to Sir John Tempest’s Waddington Hall (in the village associated with the Saxon regicide Wada).
He was betrayed by the servants of one Sir James Harrington of Hornby, and was caught by Harrington and Sir John Talbot of Salebury (a member of a very famous family, with links to the Livesey clan). Henry was arrested attempting to cross the Ribble at Brungerly Hipping Stones, and was taken to London in a most undignified manner.
This melancholy man slipped ever deeper into madness and, although through the actions of his single-minded wife Margaret of Anjou on behalf of their son, Edward, and an extraordinary turn of policy by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick – known commonly to history as “Kingmaker” – he briefly regained the throne between 1470 and 1471, he again lost it, and is said to have been murdered whilst knelt before the altar in the Tower of London, the most noble and tragic victim of a succession of petty dynastic battles.
Henry was the subject of an effort by Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, which would have led to the murdered king’s canonisation, but the fee demanded by the Pope was such that Henry VII refused to pay.
The lands about here were, in 1462, granted by Edward IV to his brother, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a man who would wax mighty in the north of England. This Richard eventually became king of England in 1483, following the tragic epiode of the Princes in the Tower, and, as Richard III, has come to be thought of as a heartless villain, probably most unjustly.
He was defeated and slain at Bosworth Field in 1485 by Lancastrians under the formerly exiled Welshman Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond. By all accounts, the king fought bravely until the end, when, unseated, he was surrounded and slaughtered by a posse of Lancastrians, as he shouted over and over: “treason! Treason!”.
