Page:History of the Fylde of Lancashire (IA historyoffyldeof00portiala).pdf/310

 of any allusion to such a structure by the investigators of William I. seems, at the first glance, a serious obstacle to the episcopal theory, but Bispham was located between the two Danish colonies of Norbreck and Warbreck, a people whose hostility to all religious houses was almost proverbial, and hence it is scarcely likely that a church so conveniently situated, as that of Bispham would be, could long escape spoliation and destruction after the prelates of York had removed their protection from the neighbourhood, at some date anterior to the arrival of the Normans in England. The ravages of the Danes indeed, throughout the Hundred of Amounderness are usually the reasons assigned why the district was relinquished by the See of York, so that the non-existence of a sacred pile of any description at the period of the Domesday Survey, is in no way contradictory of such a building having been there, at an earlier epoch. At the close of the Saxon dynasty the number of acres in cultivation in the manor of Bispham exceeded those of the five next largest manors in the Fylde by two hundred, thus Staining, Layton, Singleton, Marton, and Thornton, each contained six hundred acres of arable soil, whilst Bispham had eight hundred in a similar condition. About thirty years after the Norman Survey, Geoffrey, the sheriff, bestowed the tithes of Biscopham, upon the newly founded priory of St. Mary, in Lancaster, being incited thereto by the munificent example of Roger de Poictou. In this grant no allusion is made to any church, an omission which we should barely be justified in considering accidental, but which would rather seem to indicate that the edifice was not erected until later. The earliest allusion to it is found in the reign of Richard I., 1189—1199, when Theobald Walter quitclaimed to the abbot of Sees, in Normandy, all his right in the advowson of Pulton and the church of Biscopham, pledging himself to pay to the abbey ten marks a year during the period that any minister presented by him or his heirs held the living. In 1246 the mediety of Pulton and Biscopham churches was conveyed to the priory of St. Mary, in Lancaster, an offshoot from the abbey of Sees, by the archdeacon of Richmond; and in 1296 the grant was confirmed to the monastery by John Romanus, then archdeacon of Richmond, who supplemented the