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B1LTON-WITH-HARROGATE
The Old Township and its Neighbours
From the time of John of Gaunt, through whom the neighbourhood first
came to be associated with the Duchy of Lancaster, right down to the
"Award" of 1774, that followed the Enclosure Act of 1770, Harrogate
was often - and quite correctly - described as being in the Forest
of Knaresborough. This "forest " was a large tract of moorland, with
trees in its sheltered valleys, and having within its borders the
two enclosed Parks of Haverah and Bilton, which were deer-preserves.
The limits of the Forest are well known, for a "Perambulation" was
made from time to time and carefully recorded: the earliest that has
come down to us dates from 1576.
It was bounded in the main by four streams. Nidd, Wharfe, Crimple
and Washburn, at the four points of the compass. However, a few
minor corrections are needed to this broad outline. The northern
boundary left the Nidd at Darley to strike westwards to Greenhow
Hill. From this point south to Fewston the Forest did not end at a
river but included the whole catchment area of the upper Washburn.
There was also, actually north of the Nidd, a little pocket
containing Burnt Yates and Clint. On the east side, the Forest
boundary left the Crimple at Burn Bridge and struck south-east to
the Wharfe, the village of Kirkby Overblow not being included.
Probably the district was never densely wooded, and the
iron-smelting, carried on in the Middle Ages and after, would make
serious inroads on what trees there were. The immediate
neighbourhood of Harrogate seems to have been always marshy, as it
certainly was in the eighteenth century, when it had numerous ponds,
fed by tiny becks. It is only during the last century that the ponds
have been drained, and the brooks, for the most part; enclosed in
culverts.
The Castle, and the township, of. Knaresborough were always outside
the Forest, but the chief Court that dealt with its affairs, the
"Sheriff Turn," was invariably held there. So it comes about that
the Knaresborough Court Rolls (the records of such important
proceedings as the legalising and transfers of "encroachments," the
copyhold lands) are the chief source for the history of Harrogate
until at least the sixteenth century. They were consulted, in part,
by Grainge, and also by Walter Kaye who published his Records of
Harrogate in 1922. Kaye's contribution to the history of the town is
valuable: he printed extracts from the Registers of Knaresborough
Parish Church and of Christ Church, and, most important of all, the
records of Pannal during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Though the last have a direct connection with a part of Low
Harrogate only, they help in the understanding of local conditions
in the later period.
There is one document that was written probably before the area was
declared a Forest. In 1086 Duke William, having acquired a kingdom,
with the astuteness of his race (the Normans have been called the
Yorkshiremen of France) had a complete survey made of the whole
country. This names not Harrogate itself but places that have part
of their onetime territory incorporated in the present Borough. In
Doomsday Book are mentioned Killinghall, Beckwith and Rosset,
Scriven and Knaresborough and, the place that concerns Harrogate
most nearly, Bilton.
In the early fourteenth century, when the name Harrogate is first
mentioned, both Bilton and Harrogate were "hamlets" in the township
of Killinghall. In 1485, exactly at the close of the Wars of the
Roses, we find that these hamlets had come together to form the
"constabulary " of " Bilton with Harrogate " which, later, itself
changed into a township. This intimate association was destined to
last four hundred years, during the greater part of which this
township was to be an independent and effective unit of local
government.
Beckwith and Rosset were also "hamlets" during the Middle Ages, in
Killinghall. They, too, combined to form a "constabulary," that of
Beckwith-with-Rosset, Instead of developing into a township,
however, this became part of Pannal (another name not found in
Doomsday Book), possibly because the latter had long possessed a
church.
The result of this absorption was that Pannal became Harrogate's
immediate neighbour, for Rosset not only reached the south side of
the Stray and Otley Road but drove a huge wedge into the centre of
Low Harrogate. The sides of this wedge were, roughly, the present
Cold Bath Road and Cornwall Road: its point was the old "Crown" inn.
Included in it were almost all the sulphur wells of Harrogate. As it
was obviously desirable to distinguish it from the remainder of Low
Harrogate it was given, from about 1750 to 1820, the name of
"Sulphur Wells." This is the place that the first Joseph Thackwray,
who died in 1791, claimed on his tombstone in Pannal churchyard to
have "brought to fame."
Some vague memory of this name probably inspired the very determined
attempt made in the middle of last century to abandon the name "Low
Harrogate" in favour of "Harrogate Wells." The association of most
of the people in "Sulphur Wells" with Pannal village probably
amounted to little more than attendance at their Parish Church
(which they would reach by what is still known as "Church Lane"),
and that only till St. Mary's - a chapel-of-ease of St. Robert's,
Pannal - was specially built for them in 1824. Their interests lay
with Harrogate, a fact that was somewhat slowly but inevitably
recognised. The "Wells" came under the jurisdiction of the
Improvement Commissioners in 1841, and in 1884 this same "urban area
of the Parish of Pannal" was incorporated in the Borough. Finally,
in 1895 it became an integral part of the new "civil parish of
Harrogate," which replaced the ancient "township of
Bilton-with-Harrogate" and, sadly enough, disrupted that
centuries-old union.
Pannal, though an ecclesiastical parish, was for long in civil
affairs classed only as a "hamlet." Like Bilton-with-Harrogate, it
was in the township of Killinghall until probably the later
seventeenth century, when they both became independent townships.
Such is the strength of tradition, however, that a century after
this the Chief Constable of the West Riding was still treating the
three places as a unit.
Orders to the Militia during the Napoleonic War, and receipts for
moneys collected by the Constables "For the Repair of the Wapentake
Bridges" were still addressed by him to “Killinghall and Hamlets."
The townships of Knaresborough and Scriven were officially outside
the Forest: in fact, the boundary of Bilton-with-Harrogate was at
the High and Low Bridges, on the Nidd. These outsiders, however, had
long made claims to rights of pasturage within the Forest. These
claims once established (as they were after years of persistence)
there were bits of land to be found all over Bilton-with-Harrogate
that were assigned to these townships. The first local Ordnance map
made (1854) shows the Bilton and Starbeck areas as a sort of
patchwork quilt because of the many “detached portions" of
Knaresborough and Scriven-with-Tentergate that they contain. Among
these is the ancient "Starbeck Spa." They vary widely in size - from
less than an acre to twenty or more, but they are almost always
rectangular in shape, so fitting into the general pattern of the
"Award" of 1774. Even the south part of the township, though it
might be thought to have suffered enough at the hands of Pannal (or
Rosset), did not entirely escape the sacrifice of territory to the
townships beyond the Nidd.
Some hundred yards from the Prince-of-Wales' roundabout, by the side
of Leeds Road, is still in position an old boundary-stone of
Bilton-with-Harrogate, as the letter "B.H." on its face indicate :
on its south side is an "S," showing that here began a "detached
portion" of Scriven-with-Tentergate, and on the north side a "K,"
for here was an acre or so of Knaresborough. These fragments of
townships seem at first to have provided pasturage only, and there
were no buildings on them, but when the growing villages turned them
into building-sites, their obvious inconvenience made townships
revert to the ring-fence system.
The township of Bilton-with-Harrogate included the village of
Bilton, that of High Harrogate, and the part of Low Harrogate that
was not called Sulphur Wells. Among the old inns of Low Harrogate,
the Swan and the George were in the township, whereas the Crown, the
Crescent, the White Hart and the Robin Hood (Wellington) were in
Pannal.
Till less than a century ago these three villages were separated
from each other by open country. High Harrogate, besides attracting
most visitors in the eighteenth century because of its chalybeate
springs, possessed from about 1745 the one church of the township,
St. John's Chapel (replaced by Christ Church in 1831). St. John's
was a chapel-of-ease of Knaresborough Parish Church, the “chapelry"
being the whole township. A good half of the Church Rate went
towards the upkeep of the mother church, an arrangement not very
popular with Harrogate folk, who had to support their own church as
well. On the other hand, they received some grant towards what was
then a most expensive item, Communion wine, and they shared in the
Bread Charities of Knaresborough Parish. St. John's Clerk had to
collect loaves each month from Knaresborough for distribution to
Harrogate poor. But the connection with Knaresborough was limited to
Church matters; there was never any dependence on the part of
Bilton-with-Harrogate in the civil administration of poor relief.
There was, in fact, a good deal of friction as between rival
authorities. As late as 1810 they carried a case to the Skipton
Sessions to decide which township was to support a certain pauper.
As the township of Bilton-with-Harrogate remained unaltered and was
locally the unit of government right down to 1841, it seems fitting
that some of its achievements should be indicated. For afterwards,
when the new "town area" of "Harrogate" had excluded and isolated
Bilton, the past contribution of that part of the township was
rarely remembered. Yet Bilton families, such as the Taylor’s and
Pullan’s, the Stockdale’s and Watson’s of Bilton Hall, had not been
unimportant in the life and the affairs of the united township.
Here, when the older township is referred to simply as “Harrogate,"
it should be borne in mind that this is the abbreviation of
"Bilton-with-Harrogate."
The development of Harrogate as a health resort was foreshadowed
nearly four centuries ago. In the later days of the first Queen
Elizabeth, Dr. Timothy Bright was drawing the attention of his
medical friends to the merits of the Tewit Well, which had been
discovered in 1571 by William Slingsby, and which Bright insisted on
calling the "English Spaw." A friend of his, Dr Edmund Deane, gave
it far wider publicity in 1626 by publishing a book about it.
Following a custom of the time, he used Greek and Latin in the title
Spadacrene Anglica, but had the grace to translate this in the
sub-title, The English Spaw Fountaine. Though he dealt
professionally with his subject, giving detailed instructions as to
how and when the water should be used, his book is clearly written
and interesting to the general reader. As Deane was in practice at
York he was able to pay many visits to the well and, unlike most of
those who wrote about it later, he had a good knowledge of the
neighbourhood. About thirty years ago a reprint of this book was
published with comments by Dr. James Rutherford, who puts a good
case for accepting Deane's evidence on the early history of the
well. As this evidence was afterwards considerably distorted it is
necessary to refer to it in some detail.
On his visits, Deane obviously used Knaresborough as a base. It is
unlikely that there was as yet a suitable inn at Harrogate. He
mentions first (but merely to discredit them) two ancient "holy
wells " in that neighbourhood, St. Magnus' and St. Robert's. He
condemns them on purely scientific grounds, as he imagines, but the
note of scorn in the condemnation suggests that he was not entirely
free from religious bias. In spite of their reputed cures, he says,
of "all manner of maladies and diseases, both inward and outward,"
they are "springs of pure, and simple waters meerely, without any
mixture at all of minerals to make them become medicinable" He adds
that such places flourish "through our overmuch English credulity "
and that they attract "especially the female sex, as ever more apt
to be deluded ..... "
The site of St. Robert's Well, at Knaresborough, has not been
disputed; but St. Magnus' Well has been identified, very strangely,
by later writers, as that on the Pannal-Harrogate boundary which
gave its name to Cold Bath Road. In Deane's time there was a much
frequented St. Magnus' Well at Copgrove, a little to the north of
Knaresborough, and if he had had some other in mind it may be safely
assumed that he would have drawn attention to the fact. Besides, the
owners of the Harrogate well much later, who were local people, were
unaware of any sacred associations. In a number of transfer deeds
dated from 1736 to 1835 this well is described simply as the "cold
well" or "cold spring." In the later seventeenth century, when the
confusion arose between the Copgrove and Harrogate wells, both were
much resorted to for the curative "cold bath."
Deane wrote the Spadacrene Anglica primarily for the sake of the
Tewit Well "at Haregate-head." But he also mentioned with approval
the Dropping Well at Knaresborough, a sulphur well in Bilton Park,
another sulphur well " neare unto the towne " (probably the Starbeck
one), and what was to be known for the following two hundred years
as the " Old Sulphur Well " (now the Royal Pump Room). Its situation
he described as " beyond a place called Haregate head, in a bottome
(i.e., a valley) on the right hand of it. as you goe, and almost in
the side of a little brooke." The "little brooke " was enclosed only
about a century ago.
In the nineteenth century, after Sir Walter Scott had popularised
medieval legends and thrown a glamour about Catholic times, it was
thought good publicity to give wells the name of saints. One that
was newly discovered near the old George inn was named “St.
George's” - a compliment the inn returned later by changing its name
to the Hotel St. George. There had to be a "St. Ann's Well" : it was
to be found also in Low Harrogate.
But the case of St. John's Well," in High Harrogate is different,
for the name may contain a good deal of history. This well, even
during the seventeenth century, became much more popular than the
Tewit Well which, by the end of that century, was said to be "almost
entirely neglected." Though the Tewit Well was supposed to have been
discovered some fifty years before St. John's it was the latter that
was already known as the “Old Spaw." This claim to greater antiquity
may have been due to self-interest on the part of inn-keepers for it
was the more conveniently placed for visitors at the Queen's Head
and in High Harrogate generally. (Incidentally, it misled eighteenth
century writers into asserting that this was the well that had been
discovered by William Slingsby!) But there may be a less mercenary
explanation of why the local people called it the "Old Spaw.." A
chantry chapel had existed in Harrogate (as Walter Kaye proved) from
the early fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, and it
is probable that it was dedicated to St. John the Baptist - most
appropriately if there were a "holy well" close by. So it is
possible that the well discovered by a stranger to the neighbourhood
about 1630 may have been remembered locally as the one by which
pious folk had benefited in the days of the chantry. If this
explanation is the right one, the name "St. John's," which was
apparently first given to the well in the middle of the nineteenth
century, was merely the old one restored after the lapse of three
centuries.
The chalybeate wells of Harrogate, and what were essentially its
sulphur springs, though then nominally in Pannal, largely explain
why the township found itself towards the end of the eighteenth
century on the point of developing into a town. The visitors in the
July to September season had then already reached some two thousand.
For their entertainment there were a dozen or more inns, several of
which were soon to grow into quite large establishments. And the
first important newcomer, Alexander Wedderburn, later Lord
Loughborough, had decided to make the resort his permanent home :
about 1786, he built Wedderburn House, on the south edge of the
Stray, and set a fine example in tree-planting in the Woodlands
area. The debt owed to its waters was to be aptly recorded later in
the town motto : Arx celebris fontibus (" a borough famous for its
springs ").
But Grainge's splendid hyperbole in 1871 ("Were these fountains
dried up, the town would become a ruin") did not give a balanced
view of the situation even in his day. He ignored its other natural
gifts: its healthy air, its charming surrounding countryside, and
its convenient nearness to the industrialised southern part of the
West Riding. What is still more important, he overlooked the fact
that a town once established has usually acquired its own "will to
live," an adaptability that will enable it to meet quite new
conditions, and to survive even the disappearance of what led to its
founding.
This essential spirit of a town is something that comes from the
past. In Harrogate it is seen first when the Forest settlers
established their hamlet. Its development can be traced through
certain episodes in the history of the township. Two of these, which
have been already briefly noted, were outstanding. The first was the
gaining of the Stray in 1774, which endowed the later town with its
most characteristic feature and which showed there were leaders well
aware that it was Harrogate's business to serve a wider community.
The second was an experiment in local government, begun in 1810. As
it developed and continued till 1854 it gave the township a position
of leadership in the district. This position was a tribute to its
energy, for Knaresborough, which might have taken it had then a much
larger population.
In 1810 the roomy, fine-fronted house (now known as Old Starbeck
Hall) was built as a Workhouse on a part of Star-beck that had been
from time immemorial Harrogate land. Finding that this could
accommodate more than its own paupers, the township offered to
receive those from other places, on condition that these
out-townships paid a rent of £5 a year and met all costs of
maintenance. The scheme succeeded so well that townships covering an
area of about one hundred square miles were from time to time drawn
into it, though the number of out-townships at any one time never
exceeded sixteen.
The district, a sort of flattened circle with Harrogate about its
centre, included most of the old Forest of Knaresborough and. a
considerable area to the north and east of it. On the perimeter of
the circle on the north side were Hartwith-cum-Winsley (not far from
Pateley Bridge), Whitcliffe-with-Thorpe (just south of Ripon),
Marton-cum-Grafton, and Spofforth. Pannal closed its own Workhouse,
and other townships may have done so too. Knaresborough alone, in
this area, stayed outside the scheme and kept its own Workhouse.
Harrogate had become the head, therefore, of a kind of unofficial
poor law union at a time when the administration of poor relief was
particularly burdensome and costly. Following the long war against
Napoleon there was a steep rise in the cost of living and there were
the difficulties of readjustment of occupation caused by the
Industrial Revolution. Though the district escaped the worst effects
of the latter, it had the local problem of the serious decline in
the Knaresborough linen industry in the 1830's, with the consequent
closing-down of the Harrogate bleach-yards. The leaders of the
township at that time revealed a capacity to meet a situation and to
set a standard in public service.
In those chapters which follow that deal with the story of
Harrogate's growing-up there is no strict time-sequence observed.
The separate activities of the township are taken in turn because
the main records were compiled by its officers and the
churchwardens. Even the subjects do not appear in chronological
order. If they did, the work of the Constable would come first, as
his office is the oldest of all. But in our period the heart of the
matter is reached more immediately by considering the work of the
Overseer, who had then replaced the Constable as the most important
township officer.
Henry Peacock, Workhouse Master from 1825 to 1838, has been given
precedence even over the Overseer. From the historian's point of
view, this man had virtues both of omission and commission. He
omitted to mislay or destroy the older records, as so many of his
contemporaries in other places seem to have done, and he himself
added copiously to the records during his year of office. Besides,
as he saw the rise of Harrogate to town status he is a convenient
link between ourselves and the remoter past. And lastly, it was
quite impossible to study the records without becoming aware that he
was a personality.
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