The Growth of the Monastic Orders and Their Influence In Pilling, Preesall and Stalmine

By Brian Marshall

Almost from its inception, the Christian Church produced men and women who chose to separate themselves from the rest of society and lead a life of religious austerity in some remote place. Isolated groups, and often individual hermits, were to be found in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria, where they sought to communicate with God far from the distractions of the world. The more westerly parts of the Roman Empire, such as Britain, did not receive the Christian message as early as did the East and it was not until well after the Roman withdrawal from as having been in 410 A.D., that large scale Britain, generally regarded conversion to Christianity began to take place. The Anglo Saxon period in England saw some monastic communities established, but these were few and poor compared with the large numbers that were to be founded later in the Middle Ages.
The first great Medieval monastery in Western Europe was built at Cluny in Burgundy, in 910, and this was the beginning of the vast monastic movement that was to reach its peak some four centuries later. France, Germany and Italy saw many scores of monasteries, most following the Rule of St. Benedict, set up in their territories, each house often founding a number of "daughter houses". New orders of monks, Cistercians, Premonstratensians and others came into being, and there was a great surge of enthusiasm for communities following the Rule of Saint Augustin of Hippo, written even before that of the Benedictines. The great monastic revival did not reach England until the Norman Conquest, but once it was under way, around a thousand monastic houses were set up, though there were never as many as this in existence all at the same time. Some failed for one reason or another, while others moved to a different site because the original location proved unsatisfactory. Once William the Conqueror had begun the practice of founding monastic houses with the building of Battle Abbey, there followed other Benedictine houses such as Selby, Tewkesbury and Rochester. By the middle of the 12th century, however, the number of new Benedictine houses had been overtaken, first by the Augustinians, and then by the Cistercians, an order that maintained the most rigorous of standards and attracted large numbers of recruits as well as the deep respect of the populace.

The normal method by which a monastery was founded in Western Europe was for a wealthy nobleman to donate a site for the buildings, and further land for the maintenance of the monks. The Abbot of an existing monastery would be asked to send a group of monks, one of whom would be designated Abbot or Prior, to set up the new house, and the process was begun. It was often only a matter of a few years before the new house was repeating the procedure somewhere else.

Once established, a successful monastery quickly attracted further donations of land. These donations fell broadly into two types according to the status of the men making them. Into the first category falls the grants of land made by wealthy barons who held huge areas of land in various parts of the country. Such men would frequently donate a whole manor, together with all its people, its land, its fisheries and if it had one, its church. Grants of this size were often made to monasteries far away from the manor in question, indicating the nationwide interests of the donor. The second category involved landholders of smaller stature altogether. These were the local lords of the manor, men who came close to the bottom of the scale of feudal landholders with only one, or perhaps at most, two or three manors to their name. Unlike the great barons, a small landholder such as this did not have large areas of land to give, but might donate almost invariably to a monastery that was local, a limited area of the manor on which he actually lived. In this way a monastery might acquire over a century or so, estates amounting to many thousands of acres. The Cistercian houses, more so than those of any other order, grew rich in this respect. Fountains Abbey, for example, received land as far away as the Lake District, while Furness exploited not only its vast lands but also the deposits of iron ore found beneath them. There is a third category of donor that we should at this point consider, namely the very small landholder, not even a lord of a manor, but simply a free man who by one means or another had obtained title to a few acres of land. He too gave of his land to the monasteries: an acre here, a rood there.

From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the end of the 13th century when Edward I virtually brought such donations to an end with his Statute of Mortmain, and Statute of Quia Emptores, there was large scale transfer of land from lay proprietors to monasteries. So extensive was this transfer that it is estimated that by the 14th century, around one third of the land of England was in clerical hands, mainly those of the monasteries.

The reason for this enormous alienation of assets is simple. Men believed that they increased their prospects of going to heaven by making such donations to religious houses. This would be brought about in two ways; firstly, the very fact of the gift itself would gain the donor a great deal of credit, or grace, and secondly, the monks prayed and said masses continually for their benefactors, both living and dead, which often included members of the donor's family and others nominated by him. Thus, a man who gave land to an Abbey in say, 1200, would expect that the monks of that house would still be praying for his soul centuries later. These gifts of land to monasteries, with no condition other than the prayers of the monks, were known as grants in frankalmoign.

Amounderness, which includes, among many others, the manors of Pilling, Preesall and Stalmine, is recorded in Domesday Book, but few of its manors were at that time in the hands of local lords. In 1086/87 when the Domesday survey was carried out, the area was in the personal holding of the king; indeed, there had always been a strong royal interest which culminated in the foundation of the Duchy of Lancaster. It was not until about a century after the Conquest that individual manors in Amounderness began to pass into the hands of men who had little or no other land. Such an individual was Geoffrey the Crossbowman who received the manor of Hackensall with Preesall in 1189, while as early as 1165 we find a Robert de Stalmine in possession of that manor, though no document such as the one giving Preesall to Geoffrey has survived. By this time of course the great boom in the donation of land to monasteries had begun, and land in Pilling, Preesall and Stalmine soon began to pass into monastic hands.

The manor of Pilling is not mentioned in Domesday, probably being at that time a part of the extensive holding of Garstang. Though Garstang was given to the de Lancaster family, Pilling remained in royal hands and was given by John, Count of Mortain, later King John, to Theobald Walter, progenitor of the Butler family, who, in 1194, gave it in its entirety to the newly founded Premonstratensian Priory of Cockersand. Two years later, Cockersand was raised to the status of Abbey. As a consequence of its early acquisition by a major monastic house we hear relatively little of Pilling during the middle ages.

Earlier than the donation of Pilling is a grant by Robert de Stalmine of a carucate of land to the Abbot and monks of Furness Abbey. A carucate was probably around 120 acres. This grant was made about 1165 and was followed by other grants to the same Abbey. The holders of the manor of Stalmine, and other landholders within the township, continued to give land to Furness, and to the two nearby monasteries, namely Cockersand Abbey and Lancaster Priory.

It is usually not possible, because of the ambiguity of the original documents, to say precisely how much land was given to Premonstratensian houses such as Cockersand, or Benedictine houses like Lancaster, but we can often be much more precise in the case of Cistercian houses. All the houses in England belonging to this order were exempt from the payment of Tithe in respect of their land, and after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, all former Cistercian land remained exempt from the payment of Tithe. The extent of such land, and precisely where it lay, is clearly demonstrated in the Tithe Award Survey of 1839/40, when payment of Tithe was discontinued. A once and for all payment was made at that time and because the former Cistercian land was exempt, the land in question is indicated in maps and documents produced for the purpose. Thus at Stalmine we find in 1839 that 562 acres were former Cistercian land, once in the possession of Furness Abbey.

There are no fewer than 76 separate grants of land in Stalmine and Staynall recorded in the Chartulary of Cockersand Abbey, and large though this figure may appear, there may have been others of which no record survives. Many of these grants were of small amounts of land: two acres, half an acre, a toft, a butt, a sellion, are examples of measurements that we might or might not recognize. In some cases, no precise measurement is given and we are merely told that the donor grants all his land that lies between one point and another. Not knowing where such points might be, we have no idea as to the amount of land involved. In some instances though, we can be much more precise and there are, fairly clearly, Substantial areas involved. For example, we find a number of grants of an oxgang. This ancient measurement was normally one eighth part of a carucate and therefore around 15 acres. A cursory glance at the chartulary reveals four grants of one oxgang and two of half an oxgang, producing the not inconsiderable amount of 75 acres in only six transactions. It would be difficult, if not impossible, accurately to work out the total area of Stalmine land given to Cockersand, but a rough calculation based on the 76 surviving charters suggests a total of around 425 acres. The thirteen recorded grants to Lancaster priory are all of small amounts and a total of about 34 acres is suggested.

In the case of Preesall we have some figures from which to work: precise figures in respect of Furness and somewhat ambiguous ones in respect of Cockersand. As regards Lancaster, there is evidence of small land donations but virtually nothing to indicate their extent. The family of Geoffrey the Crossbowman, who styled themselves, de Hackensall, made a number of grants to Furness Abbey, but these were few and small, and all lay on the southern extremity of the manor so that they formed a contiguous holding with the Stalmine lands already held by Furness. The Tithe Award Survey of 1839 shows that the total area of Preesall land given to Furness was just under 42 acres.

To Lancaster Priory, the de Hackensall family gave a couple of small plots, evidently for building. It was to Cockersand, however, that the main donations of Preesall land were made. In the first few decades of the 13th century, there were two major grants and many minor ones, few of them specific in the area of land they contained. The two main ones refer to pieces of land stretching from the sands to the moss; large areas indeed as a cursory glance at a local map will show. We cannot judge from the grants themselves just how much land was involved, and it is not until two hundred years later that we have any hint as to its extent. In the 15th century, James Pickering of Hackensall, descendant of the de Hackensall family, was one of the many landholders of his day attempting to recover from monasteries, land given by ancestors some two to three centuries earlier. Men such as Pickering lived in a somewhat less spiritual age than their predecessors of the 13th century and were quite prepared to test the legal validity of these land grants in the courts. In 1437, James Pickering sought from the Abbot of Cockersand, the return of 1,342 acres of land donated by the de Hackensalls in the 13th century. His plea was of no avail, for the Abbot turned up at the Assize Court at Lancaster with the original charters, showing quite clearly that the land had been lawfully transferred. The court found in favour of the Abbot and the land remained in the possession of the abbey until 1539, when Cockersand became the last of the Lancashire monasteries to be dissolved. The Preesall land of Cockersand was mainly at the eastern side of the manor, that is adjacent to Pilling, and it was administered by the abbey as an integral part of its Pilling estate.

The three monasteries with land in Pilling, Preesall and Stalmine, were all situated at some considerable distance from their estates in these manors. Each therefore built a grange, to store the produce of its land, and to accommodate two or three lay brothers appointed by the abbot to manage the estate. The Cockersand grange was in Pilling, evidently on the site of the present Pilling Hall Farm, that of Furness was in Stalmine, on the site of a modern house called Stalmine Grange, not far from the Grangepool which forms the boundary with Preesall. Somewhat more problematical is the grange of Lancaster Priory that was situated in Preesall. There is clear reference to it in a document of the 13th century but its location is unknown. The greatest likelihood is that it lay fairly close to the Grangepool, for most of Lancaster's land in the area was in the manor of Stalmine.

The greater part of the land given in these three manors was, like land given in other manors of Amounderness, mainly waste, that is land that had never previously been under cultivation. It was then, monastic landholders who were responsible for clearing, draining and bringing into agricultural use such a large part of the fertile and highly productive landscape that we see around us.

Areas of the three manors under consideration:

Total area of land given to Cockersand Abbey: -

Total area of land given to Furness Abbey: -

Total area of land given to Lancaster Priory:-

Total of land in Pilling, Preesall and Stalmine given to monasteries - 8,466 acres

Total of monastic land in Pilling - 6060 acres = 100%

Total of monastic land in Preesall - 1385 acres = 41%

Total of monastic land in Stalmine - 1021 acres = 32%

Total of land held by the three monasteries = 68.75% of the three manors.

Where precise figures are not available, an approximate figure, erring probably on the low side, has been given. The high percentage total for the three manors is of course due to the holding by Cockersand of the whole of Pilling. Nonetheless, the totals for Preesall and Stalmine give an indication of the scale of land donations to monasteries, and accord well with national averages ranging from a third to a half. If Domesday Book is to be believed, Amounderness was an area that was, at the end of the 11th century, underdeveloped and thinly populated. Early holders of manors such as the de Hackensalls and the de Stalmines evidently presided over estates containing extensive areas that had never known the plough, and it was these areas of scrub, heath and particularly of moss, that were given to the monasteries for the well being of the souls of those who gave them. The condition in which we find these lands today is testimony to the efficiency with which they were reclaimed and managed by the monks who held them for three hundred years.