Rowley Parish – “A History”

When the Editor asked ‘Any chance a few items for the Newsletter about the history of Rowley Parish?’ I thought it might be interesting to give it a go. But thinking it over my doubts started and so I have to start with a few caveats. I am not a historian, and will inevitably get things wrong–I am sure readers will put me right, and please do so if you can. Next my own interests in the parish have taken me in all sorts of directions so topics may be somewhat random.

We all know where we are today, we have roads and fields and villages and farms and boundaries and parish and county councils and churches and schools–but how why and when did they come to be here, and why here rather than somewhere else? Who came before us and what attracted them? What sort of people were they and what were their lives like? In truth we really don’t know so I suppose history is a matter of trying to put what we know–often very little–into some sort of understanding of life as lived then.

As a parish Rowley has seen many changes in its time. As a ‘parish’ it goes back only to the introduction of Christianity since a ‘parish’ is an area with a church, but we really have no idea when this arrived here. The Domesday Book of 1079 which records that Rowley ‘has a church with a priest’. In other parts of Yorkshire missionaries were reported after Edwin’s baptism at York in 627AD, so maybe our church and parish dates from about that time.

But the names of our hamlets and village take us back at least to the end of the 4th century; passed by word of mouth, changing slightly perhaps between generations, but essentially staying the same. So we have our origins traceable through Angles, Jutes and Saxons, Vikings and Danes, to Normans through the language in our names.

From the Domesday Book in Rowley parish we have six settlements that can be roughly dated by parts of their names. The earliest Angles used ‘-ing’ to mean ‘the people of someone’s place’, and Riplingham may be our oldest settlement. Later ‘-leah’ ‘a clearing in a wood’ was used to describe lower-lying land settlements; and so we have Bentley a clearing overgrown with bent-grass (Beonet = bent-grass), Hunsley a clearing in woodland at ‘Hund’s place’, and Rowley a ‘rough’ clearing, from later settlers. Finally the ending ‘-tun’ as a fenced area gives us Weighton a fenced enclosure near willows (Widig = willows). On this one we need to be careful since ‘Market’ Weighton’s name has an almost Roman basis meaning market or town.

Ris-by takes us into the time of the Norse and Danish immigrations, not always peaceful, sometime about 870AD; the name means ‘homestead in a clearing or brushwood’. The persistence of clearings in scrub or woodland outside the village with its willows (wetland) brings us a partial picture of Rowley up to 1079.
Before the Angles arrived times are recorded even more dubiously, and we have to rely on archaeology, but we were clearly part of a major trading route from the Humber, and of course there were the Romans–that’s for the next time.

Big Thank You to Barry Heaton for his historical articles which we hope will become a regular feature of both the Web site and Newsletter.

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