A Brief History of St. Michael’s Church…at St. Michaels (Part One)

Pevsner, the British travel writer -- by which I mean he travelled around Britain and wrote about it, not that he was British and travelled abroad writing about foreign places…although he was British…and he might even have travelled abroad and written about foreign places for all I know…look, you’ve either heard of him or you haven’t, so bear with me on this -- once described St. Michael’s Church (in St. Michael’s, of course) as: “A typical late mediaeval North Country church.”
Which shows what he knew, because it’s a damned sight earlier than late mediaeval.


In fact, St. Michael’s was the only church in the Wyre to be mentioned by name in William the Conqueror’s big fat ledger of ill-gotten gains the Domesday Book (although there are actually several other churches around the district referred to in brief…just not by name) making it early mediaeval rather than late.
The vicars’ board inside the church confirms this by listing its ministers all the way back to 1196, so it’s at least 800 years old, you see, and probably more.
Because of its long history you’d naturally expect to find plenty of relics in situ, so let’s start with the door on the north side of the chancel, which dates back to the Norman period, or about 1,000 years ago for anybody who doesn’t know about these things…quite a long time when you stop to consider it.


Imagine the history that arch has seen. The Wars of the Roses, Vikings, Cromwell fighting the Royalists, the Jacobites rampaging through the churchyard with their swords rattling and their kilts flying…or possibly none of those things, because St Michael’s is a bit of a quiet nook really when I stop to think about it. Nonetheless, it’s stood through all those various historic events, as well as the Spanish Armada, Henry VIII and his six wives, Agincourt et al…even if it didn’t witness them personally.
The pointed arch, regardless of Pevsner’s somewhat dismissive attitude, of course, is typical of early mediaeval/Norman architecture.
Tradition dictates that the site of the church is even older. Tradition generally does with these matters, although on this occasion it’s probably right.
One of the earliest remaining sections is the bricked-up lancet window near the front door. Like the leper’s squint at St. Helens this window was originally used to pass alms to lepers outside.


Let’s talk about lepers for a moment, because they’re always good for a laugh (so long as you don’t know any lepers personally, of course, in which case it’s not an amusing matter at all really). If the disease wasn’t horrific enough by itself, lepers throughout the Middle Ages were considered unclean by those more fortunate.
They were forced to wear distinguishing clothes, rattle clappers and carry bowls to warn people of their approach (a bit like football fans nowadays, with their distinctive football strips, clappers and KFC boxes…only not as menacing).
Originally healthy people pitied them, but, as the problem became more widespread, the church, with its usual tact, declared that leprosy was God’s punishment against sinners. Lepers soon fell into the same category as Jews, prostitutes, homosexuals and witches (all terrible affronts to decent human beings, I’m sure you’ll agree).
Naturally such an attitude only applied to peasant lepers, aristocratic lepers being regarded as martyrs.
Interestingly, perhaps, according to Father Martinus Cawley (no relation to Father Jack Hackett), civic authorities during the mediaeval era regarded lepers as ‘legally dead’ giving them (the civic authorities that is) free reign to confiscate lepers’ goods.
However, we’re digressing.
Returning to St. Michael’s church, another early relic is the piscina, which sits on the right of the altar, (its something you put holy water into, I believe, and not the vicar’s personal loo as the name might suggest) along with the pedestal found on the east wall which, apparently, once contained an effigy of Saint Michael himself (neither of which we have a photograph of).
Even some of the stained glass windows have a long-standing legacy. The roundel in the Butler Chapel, for example, is Flemish and dates from the sixteenth century. We haven’t got a photograph of that either, apparently, but I have drawn it up.


Typical of the Wyre’s farming heritage this romantic scene depicts a couple shearing sheep. (It could have been worse.) Documents inform us that the window was originally one of a set of three…although what became of the other two we couldn’t say.
At the bottom of the picture is the word Junius (meaning June), the month when shearing generally took place. It’s accompanied by a crayfish, which probably represents the astrological sign of Cancer (June 21st to July 22nd).
Another fragment of old glass found in the Butler Chapel depicts a shield and dates from the fourteenth century.
This article’s going on a bit longer than I thought it would. Time for a seven-day break to gather our meagre wits before part two.

More Historical Titbits

Number Four: The Fylde Folk Festival

It’s hard to believe that the annual Fylde Folk Festival (held in various venues around Fleetwood) is actually into its 36th year. But it is, so there you go. As well as traditional Lancashire Clog Dancing (don’t laugh…I happen to enjoy watching them go at it with sparks flying and petticoats flouncing, and they’re a reet gradely bunch of lads and lasses who know how to sup their ale an’ awl) the festival plays host to a number of international stars of the folk scene, magicians, craft fairs and even traditional mummers.


The crew from Cookley in Worcestershire I found particularly interesting. Me and Michelle got chatting with them a couple of years back and discovered that Tony Blair had, at one point, tried to ban them from performing, on the grounds of racism. Eventually the Cookley Mummers managed to convince our over-the-top politically correct government that the tradition of ‘blacking up’ went back to mediaeval times, when begging (or performing for monies) was outlawed. The local farmers (during those thrifty winter months) would don coats made from rags and black their faces with burnt cork so that nobody would recognise them, then perform their dances to the unamused locals who would gladly pay them to clear off.
To say that some of the dances were risqué would be an understatement, especially when phallic staffs were whacked together with an eye-watering thud.


Morris dancers also appear on the menu at the Fylde Folk Festival, of course, this ancient rite of spring passage with its giddy fool and its hobbyhorse and its head slapping antics and bell jingling nonsense, probably stems from Pagan fertility festivals and is traditionally accompanied by maypoles, sword dances and lots and lots of beer.
Without the beer it just looks stupid.
With the beer it still looks stupid, but in a traditional, British, its-almost-summer-so-who-cares sort of way.

Number Five: Stalmine Hall and Village


Stalmine Hall (shown above) only dates back to the 19th century although the manor of Stalmine is, as you’d expect, considerably older.
The village itself was first recorded in the Domesday Book, at which time it was owned (or rather ‘previously owned’, because by that point he was dead, having been hacked to pieces by his brother Harold, before Harold himself bought it at the Battle of Hastings) by Tostig Godwinson. (That’s a very long sentence, but I’m too tired after writing it to edit it down into more manageable bits.)
In 1165 the manor belonged to the appropriately named Robert de Stalmine.


The chapel (above) gets its first mention circa 1200 and the cemetery was consecrated in 1230.
Geoffrey de Ballista of Hakenishou (otherwise known as Geoffrey the Crossbowman because he owned a couple of very large crossbows of which, I’m sure, he was terribly proud) and William de Stalmyne agreed that neither they nor their descendants would ever sell the:

“…chapel of Stalmyne on any occasion or pretext whatsoever.”

In 1860 the chapel was rebuilt, changing its dedication from St. Oswald to St. James in the process.
So much for that.
Next to the porch stands the sundial dating from 1690, although it’s rooted into a much earlier keeill cross base.
William Thornber had this to say about matters:

“The roof, or rather the ceiling, of the old church of Stalmine was very beautiful and antique, formed of wood, decorated and painted with a representation of the sun, moon, stars and all the signs of the Zodiac, and other curious figures and hieroglyphs, but unfortunately no care was taken to preserve it when the present church was rebuilt.”

That figures.

Being An Shorte History of Ye Olde Village of Layton

Nowadays Layton has become embroiled in the sprawling blot that constitutes Blackpool, but originally it was a village in its own right, long before the latter town was even a twinkle in the tourist department’s eye. In fact, Layton was first recorded in the Domesday Book (William the Bastard’s great personal accounts ledger of 1085) as Laton, a Saxon name (of course), the ‘ton’ being a ‘village’ or ‘enclosure’ and the ‘La’…ah, well, now, therein lies the problem, because, as always, such matters are open to interpretation. Unfortunately, however, according to our own Saxon dictionary, the only source for this prefix appears to stem from the word ‘Laeth’, meaning ‘hostile, loathsome and/or evil.’
That’s not a pleasant way to describe Layton -- accurate, perhaps, but not very pleasant. Alan Stott, the late respected local historian, records in his ‘Layton Village: A brief history of the manor’ that the name translates as the ‘enclosure by the water’. We’re not entirely sure how he reached that conclusion, so we’ll stick with our version for now, and even use William Thornber’s description of the place back in Victorian times in a feeble attempt to justify our cause: “The village of Layton, with the exception of Layton Hall and a lodge, the residence of Mr Thomas Fisher, is composed of very mean houses.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Layton might be a Saxon name, but there are older tales to be had here. Such as this one, where, according to Reverend Bulpit’s ‘Notes on the Fylde’: “Mr. Wray, at (Hoo Hill) Cemetery, has a remarkable stone hammer which formed part of a path below the surface level.”
We’ve mentioned this ‘stone hammer’ (and the prehistoric track on which it was found) before, but because it’s a good one we’re going to mention it again. Nowadays the hammer, illustrated below, is kept in a storeroom at the Grundy Art Gallery. At least, it was a year or so ago. It might have been moved by now.


Recognise it? Probably not, but let’s return to Bulpit for a more detailed description: “A hole has been worked through the stone for the insertion of a handle. The drilling of this hole would be a work of much labour. It could be accomplished by the use of flints, and I have some ancient tools (known as such by their gloss) such as would accomplish the works. They were found at a brickfield near the sports ground, worked by Councillor Fenton.”
There’s another ancient find connected with Layton, which we’ve probably also mentioned before…although I can’t be certain, so just bear with us.
The quern, illustrated below (don’t worry…we’ll be getting onto some proper photographs shortly…it’s just that my camera is a bit rubbish when it comes to taking images of anything smaller than an elephant) is currently on display at the Grundy Art Gallery (unlike the stone hammer above, which you can only gain access to if you have the right connections).Or then again, it might not be on display. It was about a year and a half back, which was the last time we saw it.


Actually, that’s just the top half. Nobody knows where the bottom half is…and just in case you’re wondering, a quern was a device used to grind grain. A wooden handle, fitted into the hole at the side, would have acted as a lever. The grain was poured in through the hole in the top, making the rotary quern the blender of its day. (See…it’s all educational stuff, is this.)
This particular quern was discovered during the construction of some annex or other at Victoria hospital, which, of course, is just on the outskirts of Layton village.
Enough of the prehistoric stuff though. Let’s get back to Layton’s Saxon roots.
Unlike Marton (which we’ve also written about in the past, so if you’re really that interested you can go and look it up) there are no ‘strip’ or ‘tenement’ fields on the earliest Ordnance Survey maps to help us pin down the village’s location. That’s because, during the mediaeval period, many Saxon strip field boundaries were removed to make way for larger mediaeval fields.
The layout of the buildings around Layton Road, however, and the fact that the road itself is lower than the houses surrounding it (Saxon road systems, like those of the Celts, typically being sunken) suggest that the area in the photograph below was once the centre of the village


No…look closely. The garden’s about three feet higher than the pavement. That’s because the road is sunken. See…we’re not just making this up to sound impressive.
That’s a cobble built cottage. (It’s a bit hard to tell what with the resolution being so low, but it’s actually constructed from pebbles off the seashore) and it’s end on to the road. That’s typical of Saxon longhouses, that is. We’re not saying that it is a Saxon longhouse. But it’s probably rebuilt on the same plot using reclaimed materials.
Somewhat uniquely for Fylde and Wyre villages, we can even tell you (in a roundabout manner) who the original Saxon chieftain was. We’ve mentioned this before somewhere, but to save you the trouble of having to go back and dig it out, here it is again (we’re too considerate for you lot, we really are):

“In 1292 Sir William Botiler laid claim to Layton rabbit warren, and during the court case successfully proved that ‘fairs, assizes, markets and salvage’ around the village had been: “…the hereditary rights of his ancestors from the accession of William the Conqueror.” Botiler, however, wasn’t Sir William’s ancestral name. Over a century earlier, the family surname had been changed from the somewhat more Saxon sounding Walter, because Theobald Walter at the time was the personal butler (or ‘botlier’) to Prince John. The name Walter means the ‘ruler of an army’ as derived from the Germanic elements for ‘rule’ (being ‘wald’) and ‘army’ (being ‘heri’). All of which suggests that, at the time of the Norman invasion, Sir William Botiler’s ancestor was the Saxon chieftain at Layton.”

Anyhow, the reason behind William Botiller wanting to prove his right to assizes and stuff in the first place was because in 1257 Henry III granted him an annual fair (from the 29th of November to the 1st of December) and a weekly market (held on Wednesdays) in Layton.
The fair, no doubt, was held on the village green in the shadow of the village cross, both of which nowadays, true to form, are long since gone.
Nil desperandum ancient market spotters; we’ve got a good idea where they originally were.


As far as we can work out, that building in the photograph above is Cross House, and it’s called Cross House because that’s where the village cross used to stand. And we know from our researches that the village green stood across the road from Cross House and, therefore, the village cross. So, if you happen to live in the house directly opposite the one in the photograph, it might be a good idea to take a mattock and a metal detector to your lawn, because who knows what those mediaeval peasants might have dropped on market day?
Layton market, as far as we can tell, was the earliest one granted (at least officially) in the Fylde.
Now then, according to the title of this article, this is meant to be a short history of Layton village. Unfortunately we’ve barely scratched the surface here, so ‘short’ is an inadequate description really. However, I’ve no doubt that, natural disasters and other distractions permitting, at some point in the future we’ll come back to the subject for another, possibly deeper, delve around

Battles, Baileys and Blackpool: Part Two

Peel Hill at Peel Corner is where the experts believe Blackpool’s own motte-and-bailey originally stood. The word ‘Peel’ occurs in the names of many such sites around Britain, being derived from the French word ‘pieux’ (a word created by pursing the lips and sneezing indignantly) referring to the wooden stakes that formed the palisades.
Exactly why the Normans felt it necessary to construct a fort here it’s difficult to tell, although the celts had also considered it a good spot for fortification.
Whatever the reason, we can presume that the local Saxons, having fought so hard to rid their territory of both the Norse and then Earl Tostig (if you’re wondering who Earl Tostig was, then try reading the first half of this article), were equally determined to see off this latest invasion.
Peel Hill itself isn’t exactly where the Ordinance Survey maps nowadays have it placed.
Let’s have the map up, shall we? In fact, let’s have two maps up at once…the original Ordnance Survey map of Peel Hill and the modern day version, one overlaid on the other just to make it extra confusing:


The area marked on the map/maps as Peel Hill is actually flat, the hill being located some short distance to the south. Place names tend to drift over time, sometimes becoming lost altogether. In the case of the Saxon village of Peel (over which the motte-and-bailey would have cast its ominous shadow) it originally stood at the location currently marked as Peel Hall Business Park, recorded on earlier maps (although again erroneously) as Peel Hall Farm.
The hill itself is shown in the photograph below...such as it is.


Yes, we know…it’s not exactly the most exciting photograph ever. In fact, it could be any old field anywhere really…but it is Peel Hill, honest. You’ll just have to take our word for it.
As you can probably see, the hill is a natural formation as opposed to a manmade ‘pudding basin’ shaped mound, suggesting that the Normans simply used the landscape to its best advantage rather than deliberately creating a motte.
Here’s what John Porter in his ‘History of the Fylde’ had to say about it: “The hamlet of Peel, situated within, but close to the Lytham border of the township, contains in a field called Hall-stede, traces of the ancient turreted manorial mansion of the Holcrofts, of Winwick and Marton.”
Nowadays, as you might expect, the ruins are nowhere to be seen, but the turret to which Porter refers, as we’ve already suggested, was probably the original keep on the summit of the motte. Many such towers were incorporated into early manor houses when the Norman aristocracy took up residence. The summits where the strongholds had stood remained advantageous for keeping an eye on rebellious Saxon villagers below and were therefore the safest locations for these unwelcome interlopers to construct their new homes.
Not all of the Saxons fought against the occupying Normans, it should be said.
As with every war, some joined forces with the enemy because it was safer, whilst others saw the invasion as a means to enhance their own financial ends. One chieftain who falls into the latter category appears to have lived in Layton.
In 1292 Sir William Botiler laid claim to Layton rabbit warren, and during the court case successfully proved that ‘fairs, assizes, markets and salvage’ around the village had been: “…the hereditary rights of his ancestors from the accession of William the Conqueror.”
Botiler, however, wasn’t Sir William’s ancestral name. Over a century earlier, the family surname had been changed from the somewhat more Saxon sounding Walter, because Theobald Walter at the time was the personal butler (or ‘botlier’) to Prince John. This, believe it or not, was a much sought after position and could only be filled by an extremely well to do aristocrat. (Theobald’s subservience paid off and, in 1185, King John promoted him to the Butler of Ireland, a position that earned him one tenth of Ireland’s entire alcohol revenue…and knowing the Irish with their drinking habits as well as we do, that must have been one hell of a massive income.)
The name Walter actually means the ‘ruler of an army’ as derived from the Germanic elements for ‘rule’ (being ‘wald’) and ‘army’ (being ‘heri’). All of which suggests that, at the time of the Norman invasion, Sir William Botiler’s ancestor was the Saxon chieftain at Layton.
Presumably, in order for his lineage to survive, he chose his allies according to which way the political wind was blowing rather than for patriotic reasons.
Another Saxon, whose loyalty seemed to lie exclusively with himself, was Morcar, who’d previously seen off Earl Tostig and bullied Earl Harold into handing over Amounderness, along with the rest of Northumberland.
When William the Conqueror first invaded it seemed politically expedient for him to appoint native Saxons as rulers in the more fractious parts of England. This often happens when one country invades another, the theory being that native noblemen hold more sway with the indigenous population than invading parties who can’t even speak the language. In the case of Northumberland William elected Earl Copsi, who willingly paid homage to William in return for such an exalted position.
The appointment didn’t last long, however. Copsi, true to form, was murdered. The assassin was Osulf who had previously been a Northumbrian earl himself. It wasn’t long before Osulf was murdered as well, at which point Earl Cospatrick promptly bought the earldom from William.
Cospatrick, however, wasn’t as content with the position as he’d led William to believe. In 1068 he joined a rebellion against the new king, supported by Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and our old favourite Morcar.
The upshot of all these political machinations (which clearly had more to do with personal status than social consideration) was the ‘Harrying of the North’, which saw numerous campaigns by William the Conqueror to quell any further such incidents.
The campaigns were bloody and, as is always the case, the innocent peasants suffered the most. Villages were raised to the ground, women and children were murdered without remorse, and entire regions were scorched.
The death toll reached as high as one hundred and fifty thousand.


The illustration above is based on a detail from the Bayeux Tapestry showing the Normans contentedly destroying British property (much like property developers and council estaters around Blackpool do nowadays).
It’ll come as no surprise then that, by 1088 when the William the Conqueror’s famous ledger, the Domesday Book, was written, the lands around Blackpool, along with those in the rest of Northumberland, were barren, desolate and smouldering.
The entry for Amounderness is actually little more than an addendum tagged onto the back end of Yorkshire. It bluntly concludes that: “Of the sixty-two strongholds, sixteen are inhabited by a few people, but it is not known how many the inhabitants may be. The remaining villages are waste.”

Battles, Baileys and Blackpool: Part One

October the fourteenth 1066 is probably the most memorable date in British history, if only because the teachers at school used to beat it remorselessly into our heads using wooden rulers. (They wouldn’t be allowed to get away with that nowadays, of course, which might explain why most of the kids I run across are thick and ignorant.) 1066 (getting back to the article) was the occasion when the Saxon king, Harold, was defeated at Hastings by William of Normandy. Ever since, the descendants of the Norman victors, along with their allies (nowadays collectively known as ‘those thieving, inbred aristocrats’…or, alternatively, if you’re a flag-waving royalist, ‘Sir’ and/or ‘Ma’am’) have retained most of the power, land and financial wealth of this country.
Here’s what happened.
According to William the Conqueror’s own version of events, Edward the Confessor (the king of England prior to Harold, who’d died in January of 1066) had actually offered him the crown. Edward himself had spent a great deal of time exiled in Normandy, so it’s difficult to say what deals had been struck between them.
Harold, apparently, had even willingly signed a document allowing the throne to pass into William’s hands upon Edward’s death.
Apparently…
Anyhow, that was William’s story. What most scholars believe actually took place was that Harold had found himself shipwrecked in Normandy during a visit to France in 1065. William of Normandy, living up to his previous title of William the Bastard, took both Harold’s brother and nephew hostage, forcing Harold to sign over his future claim to the English throne before setting them free.
All matters considered, that seems the more likely story.
Not everybody, however, agrees with this latter version of events, especially those in Normandy. The statue in our illustration below, which can be found in Falaise, depicts William in a somewhat more heroic stance than you might expect.


To complicate matters, closer to home Harold was having problems with one of our own local lads.
Earl Tostig, Harold’s other brother, ruled over Amounderness from his castle at Halton, just up river from Lancaster. Tostig wasn’t very popular with the increasingly over-taxed locals. In 1064 two important Saxon thanes, Gamel and Ulf, went to him to complain about this (as they would) but, suitably unimpressed, Tostig immediately had them executed.
Not a good move.
Later that same year he followed up this minor faux pas with another by arranging the murder of a local nobleman named Gospatric.
Understandably this didn’t go down too well. In fact, in October 1065 two hundred thoroughly disgruntled thanes met at York and elected Morcar, brother of Earl Edwin of Mercia, as their own particular favoured despot. Tostig’s treasury was duly looted, two hundred of his followers were slain, and (feeling somewhat aggrandised by this victory) Morcar aimed his armies south with grander designs on the English throne.
Harold, still an earl at the time, sensed civil war in the air and went to intercept. Diplomatically (under the circumstances) he bought Morcar off by exiling Tostig, and handing over the control of Tostig’s lands to him.
Within the year, however, Tostig was back, and this time it was personal! By now he’d joined forces with the Norwegian king, Harold Hardrada, who himself had laid a claim to the English throne. (Seems that everybody and his wife reckoned they were in with a chance.) Together they sailed up the Humber, landed at York and successfully defeated Morcar.
By now Harold had decided that enough was enough. He marched his own armies north, fought a victorious campaign at Stamford Bridge against his brother, killing both him and Harold Hardrada, and then turned back for home thoroughly exhausted, just as William of Normandy landed in Britain.
Had Harold’s troops not just trudged the length of the country and back, and fought a deadly, hand-to-hand battle against Earl Tostig, British history might have been very different. Exhausted and weary, Harold famously (although inaccurately) bought it from an arrow in the eye and William of Normandy, whether rightly or wrongly, became the legal King of Britain.
Not that his new Saxon underlings particularly agreed. Riots and battles ensued, so in order to impress his newfound authority on the defeated Saxons, William erected numerous motte-and-baileys throughout Britain.


Motte-and-baileys were watchtowers or strongholds constructed on the summits of manmade hills and guarded by soldiers decked out in the attire shown in our illustration above.
The motte itself was simply the mound around which a defensive ditch had been dug. Most weren’t particular large structures, measuring, as a rule, less than five meters in height. Not all of them were artificially constructed, the Normans sometimes making use of existing tumuli, such as appears to have been the case in Blackpool. (Bet you were wondering when we’d finally get round to a spot of local history, weren’t you? We’ll come back to that one in a minute or so.)
On the summits of the mottes stood the ‘castles’, some of which were stone constructions such as the one illustrated below that can be found at Wiston in Wales. (The Wiston motte and bailey is often regarded as one of the best preserved of its type in the country.)


Other mottes housed fortified wooden buildings. The materials used depended largely on what was available at the time and on how much the defences were required. Whether Blackpool’s motte-and-bailey was made of stone or wood nobody seems to know, because, as far as we can tell, it’s never been excavated. Stone, however, seems the most likely building material, eyewitness testimonies suggesting that the structure was later incorporated into a manor house.
At the base of the mottes stood the baileys, or enclosed courtyards. These were generally round and made of wood, although rectangular enclosures (along with rectangular mottes) have also been discovered in Scotland.
All of which brings us, by a circuitous route, back to Blackpool.
Or rather it doesn’t, because I’ve wasted too much time on all this historical background and we’ve run out of space.

The Arch and the Zodiac

After almost one thousand years, as you might expect, little remains of Bispham’s Norman heritage. However, if you look closely enough, you might just be surprised. Take the entrance to All Hallows church, for instance, which has to be one of the finest examples of Norman craftsmanship you’re ever likely to see.
Nowadays the arch is generally locked away from prying eyes, being it surrounded by a much later porch. However, when the church is open for business, it’s well worth taking a look.
Here’s what the Victoria County History has to say about it: “The Norman arch appears to have stood untouched till 1883, when it was pulled down, the stones numbered, and rebuilt again in its original position.”
The illustration below details the left hand side of the arch, with the signs of the zodiac running around it. (Cheers to Chris Clayton for sneaking into the church during a wedding one weekend and taking the photographs for us. Unfortunately, as you’ve probably gathered by now, I’ve currently mislaid said photographs, so you’ll just have to trust me that the illustrations supplied with this article are fairly accurate representations. Also, I’d like to extend my apologies to the unfortunate bride whose wedding photographs were all horribly ruined by Chris’s enthusiastic clicking and flashing in the background.)

It might be an idea to quickly run through the symbols for those not familiar with astrology. From the bottom left corner of the illustration to the top right then, we can see: Aries the Ram, Taurus the Bull, Gemini the Twins, Cancer the Crab, Leo the Lion and Virgo, whose job description speaks for itself. The blocks above them are all carved with typical Norman chevrons.
Nothing is ever straightforward with Blackpool’s history, however, and, whereas the chevron blocks are undoubtedly original, the County History continues: “Unfortunately in the rebuilding the whole of the stonework was re-chiselled and the Zodiacal carving was entirely re-cut.”
Exactly how close the carvings we can see nowadays are to the originals we’ll probably never know, the Norman originals having, apparently, been lost. Some of the modern replacements, however, also seem to have taken a battering, most notably Taurus, Cancer and Aquarius. The Victoria Country History mentions that the Norman versions of Cancer and Taurus were two of the least defaced. Whether they were considered worthy enough to leave alone, or were replaced and have since deteriorated, we couldn’t honestly say.
The next illustration details the right hand side of the arch. Again, for any of our readers not familiar with the astrological symbols, from top left to bottom right the signs are as follows: Libra the Scales, Scorpio the Scorpion, Aquarius the Water Bearer, Capricorn the Goat, Sagittarius the Hunter and Pisces the Fish.

The more observant amongst you (possibly the more fanatically ‘New Age’) might have noticed that the carvings are not in their usual order. Exactly why this is the case we don’t know. It’s possible that, during the arch’s rebuilding, several blocks were simply repositioned incorrectly.
Whatever the reason, the Victoria County History has this to add about the re-chiselling: “The carvings are very good specimens of modern sculpture, but the loss of the original 12^th Century work is greatly to be deplored.”
Leaving the rehash of the Zodiac aside, the remainder of the arch, consisting of fourteen stones, ‘the two outer orders spring from circular shafts with cushion capitals and moulded bases’, is certainly Norman.
Unfortunately, there’s also some dispute as to whether or not the arch has always belonged to the church. Reverend Bulpit takes up the story in his ‘Notes from the Fylde’: “The Rev. C. S. Hope told me that there was a tradition that the Bispham Zodiac arch had been brought from elsewhere.”
Records verifying Reverend Hope’s assertion, however, don’t appear to exist, so it’s highly possible that the tradition originated from some cynical local historian refusing to believe that anything relating to Blackpool’s Norman heritage could still be found.
So that’s that cleared up then. No wonder we couldn’t find a single photograph/illustration of this ‘grand old piece of local history’ in any books. Speaking of which, here’s one last drawing to round this article off, whilst I go and tend to my flagging soul with a bottle or two of Holy Spirit courtesy of ASDA:

The Mains Course

(Anybody who objects to the dreadful puns used in the titles of these Mains articles please let us know in writing and we’ll put a stop to them immediately. Here at the Fylde and Wyre Antiquarian we’re nothing if not amenable.)

It’s time to catch up with our ongoing investigations at Mains Hall, Little Singleton…or at least to attempt to catch up with them. Following our last visit to this stately old pile we realised just how complicated the history of the building actually was. So, cockleshell middens aside, we thought it might be best before writing an article about where we’re going to stick our trenches and why, to fill in the known history for those not as familiar with the place as we’re becoming.
Batten down the mental hatches, it’s long, it’s complicated and it involves the sort of genealogical list that we usually try to avoid like the plague. However, needs must and all that, so here goes (as borrowed from our preliminary report for the County Archaeologist):

The site consists of three main buildings; the ‘Great Hall’ to the west built in 2004 (designed as a wedding venue) which is believed to stand on the site of an earlier ‘banqueting hall’, the ‘Great Barn’ to the east reconstructed by the Hesketh family in the 17th century, again standing apparently on the site of an earlier building, and the main hall itself, the majority of which dates from the sixteenth century (although some of the rooms, constructed from timber framing with wattle-and-daub laths, might well be older).
The Victoria County History has this to say about the ‘Great Barn’: “…facing the garden are the initials, roughly worked in the brickwork, of Thomas and Margaret Hesketh and the date 1686. The building on which the initials occur is now a stable, but the upper part is usually known as the 'chapel', though no signs of its having been used as such are now visible. It is described as being 'desolate' in 1845, when 'the picture of the Virgin and Child had fallen from the altar and the altar rails were in decay.' The outside staircase which formerly led to the 'chapel,' which is now a hayloft, has long been removed.”
With regards to the main hall, the Victoria County History also notes that, over the generations it: “…has been altered and re-altered, modernised and re-modernised, alterations carried out in 1846 having almost gutted the interior.”
Around this period the west wing was completely demolished, John Porter, author of ‘The History of the Fylde’, having this to say about it: “(It) was roofed with tiles, about six inches square, piled thickly upon one another, and contained several secret recesses or hiding places, one of which was situated near the mantelpiece, and another, entered from the floor above by means of a ladder, showed manifest evidences of having been occupied.”
The evidences, to which Porter referred, were pieces of straw discovered in the priest hole during the kitchen’s demolition. These might well have been the remains of Cardinal Allen’s ‘bed’ during the Catholic Persecution. Kathleen Eyre’s ‘Lancashire Landmarks’ recalls that: “Mains Hall (was) the ancient seat of the Heskeths who were Jacobites and Papists.” As Cardinal Allen was also related by marriage to William Hesketh he would, no doubt, have sheltered at Mains Hall whenever the necessity arose.
In 1853 William Thornber wrote about the priest hole, describing it as a: “…most uncomfortable cell, both dark and confined, where the wretched inmate Dr. Allen, Father Campion, and the persecuted priest of Titus Oates, in succession, stretched his limbs on the straw that was found still littering the floor.”
Titus Oates was an Anglican minister, defrocked for drunken blasphemy and then dismissed from his job as ship’s chaplain for indulging in ‘a homosexual act’. In 1678 he claimed to have discovered a Catholic plot to kill Charles the II, accusing James, Duke of York, of being a traitor. Numerous Catholics were duly arrested and executed before it was discovered that Oates had been lying. In 1685 he was found guilty of perjury, pilloried, fined £100,000, whipped and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Presumably Thornber wasn’t intimating that Oates himself had taken refuge at the hall, but that one of the priests being persecuted by Oates had sought sanctuary there.
Thornber also spoke of the Tudor banqueting hall: “On the west, the wing now destroyed, (was) a very antique building, within which was a hall-part, having a huge open chimney and wainscoted with fluted oak of the reign of Henry the Eighth, now rotting unheeded in the garrets of the hall.”

To the rear of the main hall, as can be seen in the photograph above, stands a Tudor dovecote, reckoned by some to be the largest such building in Britain. It’s currently in a state of some neglect, lying outside the grounds now owned by the Yeomans family.

To the south of the hall (nowadays the front drive although, at one time, the hall apparently faced the river) stands what is generally regarded as the remains of the original moat (shown below). Again, this might just be speculation, the ‘moat’ being little more than two separate ponds that could easily have been mediaeval fisheries.

And so onto the geneological history…
Singleton itself, until the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), was held by Earl Tostig, although later Little Singleton (consisting of just half a ploughland) was granted in serjeanty to Banastre family and, by marriage, the Singleton family (William son of Alan de Singleton owning a mill and a fishery near by in 1245). The manor then descended into the hands of the Balderstons.
In 1565 it was assigned to the Earl of Derby and in 1602 was sold by Alice, Countess of Derby, to William Hesketh. From here on ownership of the hall descended through the Hesketh line, first with George Hesketh, who died in 1571, then with William who died in 1622.
The Heskeths, as already mentioned, were staunch Roman Catholics. During the ‘Civil War’ they fought on the side of the royalists, one of the sons being killed in a skirmish at Brindle in 1651. Because of this the family estates were sequestered by parliament in 1643 and two thirds of the land removed from their possession.
In 1717 William Hesketh registered his estate as 'Papist’. Mains Hall is included on Bowen’s map of 1752 where it’s recorded as Monks Hall, although whether this is just a typographical error or not it’s difficult to say. William Hesketh’s son Thomas inherited the manor of Claughton in Garstang and along with it the name of Brockholes. Through marriage Mains Hall now descended to the Fitzherbert-Brockholes family.
Maria Fitzherbert was famously, if not briefly, married to George IV whilst he was still the Prince of Wales. Obviously, as the heir to the throne is forbidden by the constitution to marry a catholic, the marriage was soon dissolved.
During the 1920s and again in the late 1940s Mains Hall became derelict. More recently it has acted as a farm, a private residence and a ‘B. & B.’ The hall is currently owned by Adele Yeomans whose fascination for the site’s great history led her to renovate much of the interior, preserving as much of its integrity as possible. It also led her to contact the Fylde and Wyre Antiquarian with a view to us helping investigate the hall’s history.
And that just about wraps it up for now. We’ll discuss the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’ of our test pits and trenches in another article. The sounds of snoring from our reader are a good indication that such matters can wait for another time.

The Mains Event

History groans and bulges and creaks from the walls, nooks, crannies, crevices, tunnels and priest holes of Mains Hall in Little Singleton, as Fiona, Michelle and myself discovered when we were given a personal tour of the building recently. (A personal tour! Us? How excellent is that?)

And when I write ‘creaks’ and ‘groans’ and ‘bulges’ I mean it quite literally. Flags were removed from the floor of one particular section recently, and it was discovered that the ground below consisted of nothing more substantial than plain old earth. No foundations, no floating rafts; just good old-fashioned soil bearing the weight of this centuries old manor house.
Even more disturbing perhaps, in other places, load-bearing walls had been shored up with clay bricks, such as the one in the photograph below.

When we say clay, it was more like a dehydrated block of turf, to be honest; fragile and crumbling and not the sort of hardcore you’d expect to be supporting this labyrinthine building.
Add to this the fact that some misguided burk in a previous ownership decided that the cross beams in the attic were hindering head space and so decided to hack them out, leaving the roof with no reasonable means of support, and it’s a wonder the building’s still upright.
All in all it’s a good job that Adele Yeomans is the hall’s historically inclined current owner who, through her obvious devotion to the place, is, even as I type, renovating the ancient pile.

And it’s certainly worth renovating. It’d be hard to find a more fascinating, more traditionally haunted, more complexly designed and yet more homely ancestral seat than Mains, the rooms being surprisingly small and sensibly sized with mullioned windows and grand old fireplaces and the layout of the building being bewildering to say the least.
Let’s talk about the alterations. It seems that every period of the hall’s great history, from the Banastres, through the Stanleys and the Heskeths, has added to, knocked through, twisted, convoluted and rearranged the place so much that nowadays even Lewis Carroll (working on the assumption that he was still alive of course) couldn’t have created such a puzzle box. Warped mezzanines gaze down into rooms with arched Tudor windows now presenting views into Victorian additions where once open vistas would have stood. Priest holes and hatches that lead into recesses abound (the latter one sounds like an anchorite’s cell to me), walls constructed from wooden joists and Tudor bricks mixed with Georgian bricks and Victorian bricks and, who knows (because we’re not brick experts after all) perhaps even Roman bricks, rooms that nobody can find the entrance to, wattle and daub walls, Jacobean staircases, legends of tunnels, blocked off doors that mysteriously float halfway up the walls leading to sheer drops outside because some wing or other has been removed or supplanted…the list is endless. An architectural illustrator would have a field day…or possibly a fit, depending on how much he enjoyed a challenge.

Over the centuries the hall has, metaphorically speaking, been flipped on its back, the front becoming the rear and visa versa, adding to the general confusion for people like me who lose their way trying to navigate the aisles at Sainsburies.
There are fabulous carvings on the wood panelling in the entrance hall. There’s an ancient mediaeval door against which, it’s reported, a monk, in times long gone, was tortured to death in the Victorian wing. Adele showed us musket balls most likely related to the two known visitations to Mains by the Jacobites on their way to help Bonny Prince Charlie. There was the ‘witches stick’ (another enigma that’s going to take some research) and the bayonet (the date of which we’re not even going to hazard a guess at). There’s even the recent addition of a stone circle to the grounds, which Adele hopes will annoy the hell out of smart-arses like us who think they know it all in generations to come.
Then there’s the moat (now divided into a couple of fish ponds) to the south and the peculiar embankment (which might be connected to the hall itself or might even date back to an earlier period…we need to investigate this one further as well) to the north. The embankment itself lays claim to the legend of twelve monks who died of the plague and were buried beneath the trees now cresting its spine…although even Adele raised an eyebrow at this one seeing as the trees don’t appear to be much older than a century at most. (You can see the rather grand and historical dovecote beyond said embankment in the photograph below.)

But that’s what’s excellent about Mains Hall, the mystery of its history! (How corny did that sound?) There are so many unanswered questions, puzzles, legends and ghosts surrounding the place that, for a group of fossilized antiquarians like ourselves, it has the same lure as a pheromone trap to a lonely moth. Which is why we’re going back, because we still need to pin down the original whereabouts of the Domesday manor and possibly even uncover any pre-Domesday secrets that might lurk in the grounds. It’s going to take a while to sort this lot out (there’s so much history here it’s impossible, surely, for one head to contain it all) but we reckon it’s worth it.
So, thanks to Adele for allowing us access and showing us round and, yes, we will be returning in the not distant future with our trowels and our notebooks.