Page:VCH Lancaster 1.djvu/362

A HISTORY OF LANCASHIRE from the Duddon to the Mersey: opportunity which the occurrence of many old Norse place names along the coast, and even inland, shows was abundantly seized by the roving bands of Danes and Norsemen who infested the Irish sea during the century preceding the Norman invasion.

From these circumstances of position it follows that boundaries would seldom be of old standing, nomenclature would bear the marks of intermixed tongues, and land tenure would show customs more or less foreign to each other co-existent. The combination in this county of Northumbrian, Mercian, and Danish place names, to which so long ago as 1801 the historian, Dr. Whitaker, called attention, bears witness to the intermixture of languages; of the confusion of customs and tenure, such features as the overlapping of the hide and the carucate, the simultaneous use of such terms as wapentake, shire, and hundred, and the incidence of thegnage, drengage, and cornage tenure side by side, are eloquent. The question of the boundaries can best be settled by separate consideration of the several regions which were eventually united to form the county of Lancaster.

Of these regions, that between Ribble and Mersey was the most homogeneous and bore evidence of the oldest settlement. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the conquest of this region by the English king in 923, when it appears to have been severed from the kingdom of Northumbria and united to that of Mercia. As one result of this conquest, it was placed under the ecclesiastical administration of the bishop of Lichfield, of whose diocese it continued to form part until the foundation of the see of Chester in 1541. Another result of the re-organization at this time is probably to be seen in the remarkable double assessment of the district which an examination of the Domesday survey reveals. Throughout England there were two systems of assessment for the geld: in the one the hide, and its quarter, the virgate, were the units; in the other the carucate, or ploughland, and its eighth part the bovate, or oxgang. The latter system, which was prevalent in the counties colonized by the Danes, is also marked by the tendency of the vills to be assessed, either singly or in groups, in multiples of six carucates ; the other system being marked by a similar recurring multiple of five hides. In the southern portion of Lancashire we have the unique feature of the one system superimposed upon the other.

This land between Ribble and Mersey was rated at the time of the Domesday survey at eighty hides, less one—the exempted hide being probably land belonging to the parish churches ; and the record informs us (f. 269b) that in each of these hides there were six carucates. At the time of the survey this region was sub-divided into six hundreds, which took their names from the king's six capital manors of West Derby, Warrington, Newton in