The township of Knottingley, situated three miles north-east of Pontefract in the Wapentake of Osgoldcross, developed from a 6th century Saxon settlement in a forest clearing on the south bank of the river Aire. (1)

By the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066 the settlement had acquired the status of a manorial vill.

The first documentation concerning the settlement is an entry in the Domesday Book of 1086 which reveals the Baret, a Saxon thane, had been dismissed as the manorial head and replaced by the Norman, Ranolf, a sub tenant of the de Lacy’s, Tenants in Chief to William I and lords of the honour of Pontefract of which Knottingley was a constituent part. (2)

With the death of Henry de Lacy in 1311 the lordship of Pontefract became the fiefdom of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who inherited the holding through his marriage to Alice, daughter of Henry de Lacy. Thereafter Knottingley was to remain a manor of the Lancasters’ and following the seizure of the crown by Henry Bolingbroke in 1399, the manorial vill became Crown land. (3)

From the early middle ages the vill although expanding, had a significance far beyond its size for the erection of a mill on the river bank to the west of the manorial demesne necessitated the construction of a weir across the waterway to provide the motive power to drive the mill wheel. Consequently, navigation of the waterway above the mill dam was curtailed, necessitating the transhipment of all goods and materials below that point. As a result, the manor of Knottingley became an important inland river port having a dual capacity as the port which serviced the hinterland of the West Riding of Yorkshire and also as the base from which the nearby fortress of Pontefract Castle was victualled.

The decline and demise of the feudal system from the fourteenth century set in motion the reorganisation of feudal obligations and the redistribution of land holdings. The redistribution of manorial land at Knottingley carried an important benefit for at an earlier time, the origins of which are obscure, the tenant in chief had granted freehold status to all land with the manorial vill for a singular service rendered to him by the inhabitants. (4)

The dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 made large tracts of land available to the Crown which from the sixteenth century was sold to subsidise the extravagant lifestyle of the impecunious Tudor and early Stuart monarchs. The manor of Knottingley was held by the Wildbore family from whom it eventually passed to one Grimsditch who had married the daughter of Richard Wildbore.

The Grimsditch family were of yeoman stock, not particularly wealthy, and when one of the sons incurred substantial debts the only recourse was to sell part of the manorial holding. Thus, by the seventeenth century the manor of Knottingley had been divided into four separate holdings, one part being held by John Grimsditch, a second by Stephen Grimsditch, tenant of one of the recently created Cridling Park farms, a third portion was held by John Wildbore and the remaining land by Richard Smyth, all being of yeoman stock. (5)

In 1637 Sir Arthur Ingram, a nouveau rich capitalist of a type engendered by the spirit of that era, having financial interests in the township and its vicinity, purchased the manorial rights at Knottingley and installed his nephew and namesake in a newly built manor house at Hill Top, close to the mansion of the Wildbores’ which stood adjacent to St. Botolph’s Church. (6)

For 150 years from 1637, the manor of Knottingley was in the possession of the Ingrams and their descendants but following the demise of the Rev. Gooderick Ingram in 1787 the manor was again sub divided and at the time of the enclosure survey in 1795 the manorial lands were held by the families of Frank, Wasney, Poole and Thompson. (7)

The limestone extraction industry whilst long established within and around the township of Knottingley developed rapidly from the mid-eighteenth century stimulating land purchase. As a result, by the first decade of the nineteenth century much of the manorial land, particularly within the former open field to the south of the town, had been acquired by limestone merchants such as Edward Gaggs, William Moorhouse and Benjamin Atkinson, who by virtue of wealth obtained through their varied business interests, were the leading figures in the social and economic life of Knottingley.

The rise of Knottingley as a significant river port involved with the coastal and inland trade from the fourteenth century also encouraged the introduction of local shipbuilding and allied trades as a corollary to the maritime activity. Thus, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the place was a hive of activity with the potential for further industrial and commercial development stimulated by the rapid progress of the Industrial Revolution. Yet despite the developing trends the settlement at that time was little more than an extensive village, predominantly agricultural and pastoral in nature, retaining many aspects of its rural characteristics, its low lying verdant fields, limestone buildings, and gardens hanging above the craggy quarries with their gently smoking kilns and with numerous keels and sloops swaying peacefully at anchor on the river Aire. (8) The sense of timelessness and romanticism which produced the picturesque scene was, however, superficial for beneath the surface, poverty, squalor and disease marked the daily life of the majority of the inhabitants bringing hardship and suffering in profusion while the lack of a common standard of hygiene produced periodic epidemics from which even the more socially detached wealthy middle class citizens within the town were not immune. Consequently, by the advent of the nineteenth century an admix of national legislation and local self interest combined to produce somewhat grudging measures of poor relief and social and civic improvement designed to alleviate the worst conditions faced by the populace.

The course of the nineteenth century was therefore a period of transformation from ancient to modern township so that by the advent of the following century Knottingley was a prosperous industrial centre characterised by the pride of its inhabitants in the town to which they belonged.

It is the purpose of this study to examine specific aspects of the developing township during the nineteenth century to reveal the course of the transformation and its effect upon the people of that age.

©2005 Dr. Terry Spencer