Part 6 – Tintwistle, Arnfield and Crowden
For 200 years after the Anglo-Saxons arrived, both sides of the Etherow valley were part of a single lordship. However, in the 870s the Danes seized the south side, taking it into their county of Derbyshire, and when 50 years or so later the English drove them out the north side became part of the new county of Cheshire, creating a boundary which persisted till 1974.
The Cheshire Domesday entries are sketchy, but Tintwistle (Tengestuisie) appears to have been a very small settlement, worth in 1066 four times less than Padfield despite being larger in area, stretching over the tops to Micklehurst and nearly eight miles up the valley to Saltersbrook. It did have lots of trees, but then so did everywhere else – all the villages had to clear them to create space for fields, and woodland itself was valuable, for fuel and building materials and food for pigs and deer.
There would also have been passing trade, as it was on the main line of the saltway up the valley. However, that also meant that in 1068 it was directly in the path of William’s avenging army, and like the villages on the Derbyshire side, 18 years later it was still “waste”. In 1066 it had been held by an unnamed freeman, but by 1086 it was under the control of William’s Norman henchman Hugh d’Avranches, Earl of Chester.
It isn’t certain that it ever had any shared arable land. On the north-west side of the village there’s a group of three fields, nos 76-78 on the 1847 Tithe Map (see pic), the names of which – Over, Middle, Lower – suggest they might once have been a single field, and on the west a Town Field, a term often used for the first ploughland of a new settlement. However, in a 1360 survey of the Cheshire side of the valley there’s nothing to suggest that any land was still being farmed collectively. On the Derbyshire side, not only are open fields much more obvious on the maps, but some of them may not have been enclosed till the early 1600s.
Arnfield isn’t mentioned till 1350, but by 1360 it was a substantial village divided into Great and Little, which suggests that it was there in 1066 but just part of Tintwistle. Crowden is also not mentioned till 1350, and even then may just have been a physical feature – “the valley of the crows” – but by the late 1600s it supported one of the largest manor houses in Longdendale so again may well have been settled much earlier.
Woodhead doesn’t appear till 1424. The name has led to assumptions that the whole valley was heavily forested, but it just signifies the highest point at which trees could grow. Longdendale (Langedenedele in Domesday) is also often mistranslated as “the long wooded valley” but it’s tautologous – in Old English “dene” and “dele” mean the same thing. By 1360 there were lots of cattle and sheep in the valley, so there must have been lots of pasture as well as trees.
And that’s the key difference between the Derbyshire and Cheshire sides. In the 650s they may have started out together, but when the Normans arrived the Derbyshire side was taken into the Royal Forest of the Peak. There was a lot of woodland there too, but for over 200 years the locals risked fines or worse if they cleared it or made much use of it, so had to make the most of the open fields on which they did have rights. On the Earl of Chester’s land there were no such restrictions, so fields could be enclosed and new ground cleared for cattle and sheep, a better bet than cereals in an upland area with the weather getting colder. In 1066 Tintwistle was a very small place, but by the early 1300s it was trying to become a town.
However, all was not lost on the Derbyshire side. In 1285 the Abbot of Basingwerk talked his way out of the worst of the forest laws, and his Manor of Glossop was free to grow. Next week we will visit two villages which played a major part in that.
NEXT – Part 7 Charlesworth and Simmondley
PREVIOUS – Part 5 Hadfield and Padfield