8th June, 2007
When we look into life in Wigan in the 11th century, we discover a world very different from our own. Wigan was in the hundred or wapentake of Neweton, which was based on the town now known as Newton-le-Willows. At that time Lancashire did not exist as an administrative unit.
Terms such as "thegn", "dreng" (Norse word for thegn), "villein", "cottar" and "bordar"(same as cottar) are alien to our modern tongue, but their meanings were very important to our medieval ancestors as their daily lives were governed by a complicated social system involving the right to hold land in exchange for homage and performance of obligatory services to a superior lord.
Everyone knew their place and the lords took great care to keep the peasantry in theirs.
Once the country was under the control of William of Normandy, he rewarded his followers by granting them land. In 1072 or 1073, the area between the Mersey and the Ribble came into the hands of Roger de Poitou, son of Roger Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury.
The Feudal System
The system of land tenure at that time was immensely complicated and differed from place to place. In theory all land was owned by the king. In return for services of a military or agrarian nature, he gave control of his holdings to barons and other powerful men of whom he approved.
The barons then enfoeffed others to be their vassals on a similar basis. "Villeins", "serfs", "cottars" and "bordars" were at the base of the pyramid.
The basic measurement of land area was known as the "oxgang" or "bovate". This was the amount of land an ox could plough in one year. The exact measurement varied widely from place to place depending on the quality of the land, but was usually thought to be about 15 acres. A "carucate" was eight "oxgangs", about 120 acres.
The Domesday Book
In 1086, according to the "Anglo Saxon Chronicles", William "sent his men over all England into every shire" with instructions to survey his subjects and their property. Comparisons were to be made between the state of the kingdom in 1066 and 1086 in order to gauge the effects of William's rule. The results became known as the "Domesday Book".
The Domesday survey describes south west Lancashire as a sparsely populated area of mosses and woodland with scattered isolated villages. There were no towns.
It was a land of unrest with an intermixture of languages where Anglo-Saxon and Norse words were freely interchanged. One example of this is the common use of the words "hundred" and "wapentake". Both have exactly the same meaning but the first is Anglo-Saxon and the second is Norse.