DOMESDAY SURVEY
Makerfield, Salford, Blackburn, and Leyland, and it seems probable from their assessments that the five-hide unit was in force here as in other counties. Thus, West Derby contained approximately 120 carucates or 20 hides, Newton 30 carucates or 5 hides, Warrington 58 carucates or nearly 10 hides, Salford 121½ carucates or just over 20 hides, Blackburn 96 carucates and Leyland 54, or together 25 hides. At the same time the existence of the six-carucate unit appears not only from the assessment of six carucates as one hide, but also from the assessments of the parishes, so far as it is possible to reconstruct these by grouping the Domesday vills or manors and summing up their individual carucage as deduced from records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It will be found that if the hundreds be thus divided into parishes, the assessment of these latter will as a rule be approximately a simple multiple of six carucates. A good example is the hundred of West Derby where the parishes are rated in carucates as follows:— Halsall 12, Ormskirk 12½, Sefton 23½, Walton 36⅜, Huyton 12, and Childwall 22½. Allowing for the difficulty of reconstructing the groups this is sufficiently near, and a still better case is Leyland hundred where we find Penwortham 9 and Leyland 9, Croston 17¾, Eccleston 18¼.
We have thus what we may call a normal English, or hidal, assessment imposed upon a normal Danish, or carucal, assessment; the latter, instead of being abolished, surviving, possibly for purposes of local taxation and jurisdiction. A further interesting Danish survival is to be found in the style of wapentake applied to the court of the hundred or 'shire,' to use the title applied to these hundreds for centuries after the conquest, and even now employed colloquially by some of the oldest inhabitants.
The boundaries of this interesting and unique region were clearly defined by physical objects, the Mersey on the south, the Ribble on the north, and the Pennine range on the east, a western spur of this range which divides the watershed of the river Aire from the western Calder constituting a natural boundary on the north-east.
Immediately to the north of the Ribble lay Amounderness, within the ancient kingdom of Northumbria and diocese of York, to whose cathedral church this district was granted by King Athelstan in 930.[1] But, as in the case of an earlier grant to the monastery of Ripon, it was not destined long to remain in the hands of the church, and by the end of the Confessor's reign it was entirely in the hands of Tostig, earl of Northumberland. The wasted condition of Amounderness in 1086 may have been due at least as much to the deposition and outlawry promulgated against Tostig by the gemot at York in 1065, followed by the slaughter of his followers and the plundering of his possessions by his enemies,[2] as to the Conqueror's ravages. The whole of this region was dependent on the capital manor of Preston, and was probably divided into four parishes,— Preston, Kirkham, Kirk Poulton, and St. Michael on Wyre. After the conquest it was treated as a hundred, and the whole was brought within the metes of the Forest of Lancaster. On the south the Ribble formed the natural boundary, and on the east its tributary the Hodder and the fells of Bowland and Bleasdale, while the vast peat mosses of Pilling, Cockerham, Winmarleigh, and Garstang formed a natural division from Lonsdale on the north.
