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1. The origin of Chorley Fair, and the perils of place-name identification

No stranger to the Fine Rolls project, this month we are delighted to feature Dr Jonathan Mackman discussing the important topic of place-name identification. Dr Mackman, who is currently working on the Gascon Rolls project, has been employed on this, and other projects, to undertake place-name identification.

⁋1In any project of the style and scope of the Henry III Fine Rolls, editorial input, and the accuracy of that input, is unquestionably one of, if not the most critical aspect of the entire undertaking; and of all the various parts of that work, proper identification of the various people, places, institutions and other entities appearing in that work is one of the most crucial - perhaps second only to getting the translation right! The identification and indexing of place and personal names in such texts can be a neglected part of such editorial endeavours, and one which is often done only grudgingly by editors who see it as a necessary evil to be overcome in the weeks before publication; after all, how important can one single name be in the great scheme of the text being offered for the benefit of the academic community? However, accurate identification of such names is not only vital to the proper understanding of such texts, but, when done badly or imperfectly, can have far-reaching and unforeseen consequences. With important texts like the fine rolls, where the calendars will become the standard work for generations of historians, both professional and amateur, accuracy is clearly paramount if we are to avoid creating errors or misunderstandings which may echo down the ages. One item discovered during recent work on the fine rolls highlights all too clearly the problems which can arise when editors of texts, even with the best of intentions, do not get things quite right.

⁋2The fine roll for 35 Henry III records how, around the end of November 1250, William de Ferrers, earl of Derby, acknowledged a debt of 11 marks with King Henry III in return for the grant of a charter establishing a market and fair at ‘Hecham’ and ‘Cherl’’. ¹ The entry itself is relatively unremarkable, and certainly little different to numerous similar entries relating to the establishment of markets and fairs across England at this time. No other details appear in the fine, and no county is recorded, just the bare details of the financial transaction. The entry is also slightly ambiguous. Since ‘market’ and ‘fair’ both appear in the singular in the original Latin, is this a single market and fair to be held in two, presumably contiguous places? Or is it for a market at one place and a fair at the other? Or for both at both places? Such vagueness is far from unusual; after all, the fine rolls were concerned with the size of the debt, rather than whatever the reasons for it may have been.

⁋3The fine roll may not have been concerned with such technicalities, but at least some of the answers lie on the charter roll, which records, in rather more detail, that on 15 November 1250, at Marlborough, Ferrers was granted the right to hold an annual fair at his manor of ‘Hecham’ on the vigil, feast and morrow of St Botolph (16-18 June), a weekly market on a Friday at his manor of ‘Cherl’’, and an annual fair at ‘Cherl’’ on the vigil, feast and morrow of St Lawrence (9-11 August). ² In 1903, the editors of the charter roll calendar seemingly had little trouble in identifying the first of these places, quite correctly, as the earl’s important manor of Higham Ferrers, situated in the Nene valley in eastern Northamptonshire. Meanwhile, the second place, ‘Cherl’, was identified with apparently equal certainty as Charlton, a small village in the south-west corner of that same county, in the hundred of King’s Sutton. ³ Quite understandably, these identifications have since been followed without question; few historians have the time or inclination to check such details with the original manuscripts, and identifications given in the indices to such respected works are generally accepted without a second thought. For instance, the recent Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs cited the calendar’s identifications of these places in its descriptions of the markets and fairs at both Charlton and Higham Ferrers. ⁴

⁋4However, a brief examination shows that the identification of Charlton has significant problems, not least of these being the fact that William de Ferrers does not seem to have had any territorial interest in Charlton. The Victoria County History has yet to reach King’s Sutton hundred, but George Baker’s unfinished history of the county certainly did, and while he records the names of various holders of lands in the village from the medieval period, the Ferrers family is not amongst them. ⁵ Furthermore, even if he had owned the property, why would someone of Ferrers’ standing have sought to set up both a market and a fair in a place as small and as relatively insignificant as Charlton? Charlton was only a small village, and there were already markets and fairs at a number of nearby towns, most notably at Brackley, only four miles away. Also, the variant given on both the fine roll and the charter roll, ‘Cherl’’, though plausible as an abbreviation for Charlton, is rather unlikely. As all medieval historians are well aware, Chancery scribes were only too eager to save on ink and parchment, but omitting the ‘-ton‘ entirely from the name is perhaps an abbreviation too far. However, no place of a similar name appears anywhere else in Northamptonshire, or indeed in the immediate vicinity of Higham Ferrers, and although its identification as Charlton has problems, if we are to assume that the two places are linked then at first glance there would seem to be few alternatives.

⁋5However, another fine on this same roll clearly shows the inherent danger in making such assumptions. In January 1251, Peter de Goldington made a similar fine with the king, in his case for having a charter of free warren at two of his manors, named in the fine as ‘Stokes’ and ‘Cotes’. ⁶ Again, no county is recorded in the fine, and the names themselves are far from uncommon, but Goldington’s estates were far less extensive than those of the earl of Derby, and there is no doubt that the manors concerned were Stoke Goldington in Buckinghamshire and Coton in Northamptonshire, identifications confirmed by the corresponding entries on the charter rolls, where both places are recorded together with their relevant counties. ⁷ Given the similarities in the entries, at least on the fine roll, and the lack of specification in both, the assumption that ‘Cherl’ must necessarily be in the same county as Higham Ferrers, just because the two appeared together in the fine, is clearly flawed. With that in mind, a search for likely Ferrers properties elsewhere in England soon reveals a far more viable identification for ‘Cherl’, a place where earl William was expending considerable attention at this time, and for which, rather surprisingly, no similar charter had hitherto been identified: the nascent Lancashire borough of Chorley.

⁋6The precise dates of the establishment of the borough, market and fair at Chorley have long been a mystery. The account of the town given by the Victoria County History, published in 1911, stated that ‘the grant of a market and fair does not seem to have been preserved’, although it did suggest that the establishment of the borough probably took place between 1250 and 1257. This was based upon the assumption that the borough was founded by William de Ferrers, who acquired Chorley in 1250, and the fact that in 1257, when Ferrers’ lands were in the hands of Prince Edward, the prince’s bailiff rendered an account explicitly for ‘the borough of Chorley’. ⁸ A study of the town carried out by the Lancashire Historic Town Survey Programme, published in 2006 and largely following the account given by the VCH, found no further evidence for the foundation of the borough, fair or market, but did note that the borough at least had struggled to become established, and had failed entirely by 1341, when it was noted that there were no boroughs in the entire hundred of Leyland. ⁹ Maurice Beresford was in little doubt that Ferrers was responsible, linking it with a wider pattern of borough foundation undertaken by the earl in this period. However, Beresford’s statement that Ferrers established the borough at Uttoxeter in 1251, ‘six years before his borough of Chorley’, is presumably based on the same 1257 date taken from the account of Prince Edward’s bailiff, and thus that date can only be taken as a terminus ante quem. ¹⁰ The charter of 15 November 1250, which can now be shown to have established the market and fair in the town, clearly refers to Ferrers’ ‘manor’ of Chorley, not his ‘borough’, suggesting that the foundation of the borough, if the wording of these two scribes can be seen as indicative, did indeed date to some point between 1250 and 1257. However, given the rather shaky later history of the borough, and the absence of any categorical evidence of such a foundation, it is far from certain that any formal establishment took place at this time.

⁋7No clear documentary evidence for a market and fair in Chorley has previously been discovered prior to 1498, when, as the VCH notes, as part of a series of quo warranto enquiries in the county, Lord Strange and his wife Joan, Sir Edward Stanley and Richard Shireburne were ordered to appear in the palatine court of Lancaster to show by what right they claimed a market in Chorley, held on Tuesdays, and a fair held on the vigil, feast and morrow of St Lawrence. ¹¹ Unfortunately no pleading has come to light, and there is nothing to show whether this reflected institutions which were actually being held at the time or just the defendants’ right to hold them, or indeed what their response to this demand may have been. Nevertheless this does suggest that such gatherings must have existed at some stage, regardless of whether they were being held at the time. The fact that the market referred to in the summons was to be held on a Tuesday, while the grant of 1250 clearly refers to a Friday, is not a major issue. As noted, the borough had ceased to function by the mid-fourteenth century (if, indeed, it ever had functioned to any great degree), and it is quite possible that the original market may also have ceased, with the 1498 market perhaps being an entirely different and unrecorded creation. Alternatively, and perhaps more likely, it may just have been moved to a more convenient day; the market at nearby Bolton, for instance, granted to Ferrers in the following year (December 1251), was originally to be held on a Monday, but by 1498 it had moved to Fridays. ¹²

⁋8However, the fact that the fair in Chorley mentioned in 1498 was held on the same three days as the 1250 grant is rather more significant, given the multiplicity of dates and lengths of time when such fairs could have been held. There is no evidence that the fair had been held continuously for the intervening 250 years, and it may well have lapsed for periods during that time, but it seems highly likely that the fair mentioned in 1498 does represent the continuation of one granted at the earlier date. It is surely no coincidence that this fair should be held around the feast day of St Lawrence, the saint to whom the medieval church at Chorley was also dedicated. Such situations were not uncommon, and indeed at Newport in Monmouthshire, where the church was also dedicated to St Lawrence, the fair was also held on the same three days. ¹³ The church at Chorley was originally a chapel to the nearby parish church at Croston, and there is no clear evidence of a church in the town prior to 1362, when the parishioners asked the bishop that the church, presumably newly built or renovated, be dedicated. ¹⁴ However, there is every likelihood that this church was the continuation or successor of an earlier structure on the same site. Alternatively, the converse is also perfectly possible, that the new church was being dedicated to the saint on whose feast day the town had been holding their fair for the previous century. Indeed, into the twentieth century, one of the town’s four main fairs continued to be held on 20 August, the slightly different date merely reflecting the 11 days lost in 1753 on the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

⁋9The ‘Cherl’’ variant given in both the fine and the charter is also a far more likely abbreviation for Chorley than it ever could be for Charlton. As noted above, while not an impossible rendition for a busy scribe, it would have been a highly abbreviated and confusing variant for Charlton, but corresponds perfectly with other known variants for Chorley from the thirteenth century, the abbreviation merely representing the omission of a final ‘e’ or ‘es’. ¹⁵ The variant is clearly similar to that appearing in a charter of free warren from the following year (14 December 1251), when ‘Cherles’ appears within a list of Lancashire manors for which Ferrers was granted this privilege, and also to a final concord made by Ferrers in 1252, when the town’s name was given as ‘Cherle’. ¹⁶ Since the information for all these transactions, including the spelling of individual names, would probably have come from documents drawn up on behalf of Ferrers himself, the similarities in the variants would also seem to point strongly towards this identification for the 1250 fine.

⁋10None of the evidence put forward for the association of this fine with Chorley is, in itself, absolute proof of this identification, but taken together there would seem to be very little doubt that this fine, and the charter which accompanied it, do indeed represent the missing link in the history of the medieval town of Chorley. The association of the grant with Charlton, seemingly made solely on the ‘link’ with Higham Ferrers, can clearly be discounted, and with that removed, everything else so far discovered points firmly to the Lancashire borough. Why neither the fine roll nor the charter roll scribe took the trouble to give the county concerned, especially when they are so far apart, may be slightly puzzling, but it may be that they simply considered that two of the most important parts of the earl’s estates needed no further description. However, the identification of place names in medieval sources is far from an exact science, relying as it often does upon circumstantial evidence, the balance of probabilities and what would appear most likely for a particular instance. It is not just the appearance and development of the name itself which must be taken into account, but also the other known facts of the case, and in many cases, a simple examination of whether the obvious or most likely identification actually fits into the other known facts of the case can soon strengthen or disprove a particular possibility. And that is before anyone even considers the possibility that the scribe may just have been having a bad day! Such a considered approach is clearly what was needed here, taking into account not just the name itself, but the tenurial and historical background to the episode, and other similar if totally unrelated entries from the same source. In this particular case, the available evidence, while not categorical, would certainly seem unquestionable, and as such this would seem to be one of the missing pieces in the history of the development of the medieval town. Yet, quite apart from the impact this re-identification has on the history of these two settlements, or indeed upon the landed and mercantile policies of one thirteenth-century earl, this example shows quite starkly the importance of accurate and thorough identification and indexing in publications such as these, and the problems which can arise as a result. Successive historians of Chorley have failed to notice the evidence which was actually there for all to see, not through any failing on their part or because the sources were not available, but largely because the editors of one volume had misidentified the place as somewhere else, and thus effectively hidden it from view. Even a simple question mark in the index might have alerted the keen reader to a potential problem, causing them to question the identification and possibly put the pieces together; instead, the truth has remained hidden for over a century. Bringing the mass of information locked up in these historical records to a wider audience through publication and, more recently, digitisation, is a huge achievement and a great step forward in scholarship, and one small error should not detract from the achievements of countless editors over the last two centuries and more. However, all of us involved in such work must take extreme care not to do anything in our editorial standards or procedures which might have the opposite effect, and lead to the very information we are trying to bring to light being buried even more deeply than it was before.

1.1.1. C 60/48 Fine Roll 35 Henry III (28 October 1250–27 October 1251), membrane 22

1.1.1. 66

⁋1 Concerning a fine for having a charter. W. de Ferrers, earl of Derby, owes the king 11 m. for a charter to have a market and fair at Higham Ferrers and Chorley and for acquitting the same charter from the [fees of the] Chancery.