1. The earliest times

The origins of Great and Little Crakehall are lost in the mists of time. The area had its Romano-British inhabitants before the Anglo-Saxons came. Though the Anglian settlers gave most of the present place names that is no reason for believing that they settled Crakehall for the first time.

Many of these Anglo-Saxon place names and field names show how wooded the countryside around Crakehall was when the Anglian settlers arrived. [For a list of Crakehall field names, with their earliest recorded dates, see HERE] The majority of them refer to small trees of scrubland rather than big forest trees: Brompton (broom), Heselton (hazel), Burtree (originally buirtre, meaning elder), Thornton and Thirn (hawthorn); the names Scroggs and Ruswick (in Newton le Willows) refer to scrubland generally. Much of this may have occupied areas that the earlier British inhabitants had already cleared of forest. At the same time, Crakehall was fortunate (and perhaps unusual) in still having some ancient woodland. Some was on the gently rising land south of the beck, in the area of the present West Pasture House Farm. The Anglo-Saxon farmers and their descendants saw the potential of this area for arable cultivation and cleared the trees. The clearance is still commemorated in the old names in this part of the village - Oxthwaite, Riddings and Rudding lane, the ancient lane that now leads to Pasture House, all contain Anglian terms for wood-clearance.

The forest recorded in the Domesday Book (1084) as silva pastilis was mature woodland with well-spaced trees, probably oak, suitable for pasturing farm animals. Crakehall was the only manor in the area that had this kind of woodland in 1084. In most places only silva minuta, coppiced woodland or underwood, was recorded. The woodland described in Domesday covered about a fortieth of the area of the manor of Crakehall (perhaps about 40 acres) and lay in the east of the village, along the beck below its junction with Rand beck. These woods survived into the seventeenth century, when they were called the East Hagg, Low Wood and Bristol or Burstall Wood. Local carpenters still described this as a wood of great timber and a reasonable rank wood of oak timber in the 1590s. On the hillside between Crakehall and Cowling, the Scroggs was still underwood (scrub) late in the 13th century, when it is mentioned in a legal case.

The beck must have been one of the greatest attractions of the area for the settling farmers. The Bedale beck is a fast running stream and supported watermills at Constable Burton, Patrick Brompton, Crakehall, Kirkbridge, Bedale and Leeming. In Crakehall the Rand Beck provided Rand with its own watercourse before joining the Crakehall Beck in the east of the township. The spring line at the foot of the ridge below Cowling provided additional water supplies for the southern part of the township, and gave rise to the names sinks for the fields along the road to Newton le Willows. There were patches of marshy ground and pools scattered around the township. Rush Close and Carr Close, on the boundary with Newton le Willows, refer to the marshy ground around the Sinks springs where there was still a greate ponde in 1624. In Little Crakehall, Powsley Carr (called Polseave Carr in medieval documents) was a marshy pond traces of which still remain near to The Grange. The flatter parts of the main valley bottom were also boggy in the areas known as the Bottoms above High Mill, Cringle Mire in the bend of the beck below Crakehall Mill, the Batts near Crakehall Mill and Kirkbridge Mill, and at Mirefall below Kirkbridge. An important set of ponds, still very boggy in places, were known as Vyvers (Evers and Brown Mire on later maps). These were close to the junction of the Bedale and Masham roads at White Cross. The name is one used for fishponds in many monastic records, and this may have been their role in early days, but the area was being used as rough pasture by the sixteenth century.

By far the biggest piece of wetland in Crakehall was the Ings, beyond Kirkbridge.This area, on both sides of Scurfe Beck, was probably water meadow that flooded in winter. It was used for hay and for summer grazing from the earliest times. The Domesday Book survey specifically records meadow in Crakehall - a most valuable attribute of the manor. Well into the the seventeenth century it was shared in common by Langthorne and by Great and Little Crakehall (see Chapter 4). South of the Ings was Low Wood and its wooded boundary dike and bank can still be seen winding its way to the Scurfe Beck, its curving line contrasting with the straight hedges and dikes of the Victorian fields in the Ings. Between the two lay the Lady Close, a big, fine meadow shared by the farmers of Great Crakehall, which is mentioned in documents as early as 1327.

We must picture Anglo-Saxon and early Norman Crakehall as a tamed, but only partly cultivated landscape, with small areas of ploughed land and rough grazing in the scrub and woodland beyond. Patches of meadow and marsh in the low-lying ground would provide hay for winter feed and willows and reeds for walling and thatching the simple wooded houses. Cart tracks would lead from the houses to the fields, meadows and woods. Some of these can still be identified: Rudding Lane was still described as the way to Newton Fields in 1624; Greengates Lane was the way from Little Crakehall to the Ings; the Back Lane (Blind Lane) and Station Road led to the Scroggs grazing; Kirkbridge lane led from Great Crakehall to the Ings.

The ancient crossings of the beck were at Kirkbridge on the Langthorne-Bedale track, and near the present Crakehall Bridge, which was approached from the north down the old Blacksmith Bank.The name Kirkbridge occurs in medieval documents and must therefore be the site of a very early bridge. The beck crossing at Crakehall was a ford until quite recent times. William Hird of Bedale, who recorded in his Diary the area as he remembered it, or had heard talk of it as a boy, describes it at the end of the eighteenth century as an unsafe wath (ford) and a wooden footbridge. Nineteenth century maps and pictures show the beck in an unembanked course, much wider and shallower than its present channel. With its stony bed it might have been fordable above the present weir; below that a bridge would have been needed across the millpond.

2. Expansion of cultivation

In common with most other accessible parts of North Yorkshire, Crakehall was devastated by the Norman army during the wasting of the North. Following the resettlement of the villages , the farmers began the task of putting more of the land into cultivation. They continued clearing the scrub and woodlands, and gave names to tracts of the ploughland they formed that commemorated the process - Riddings, Lunds (cleared from Low Wood), Burnt Earth and Burnt Wood on the western boundary of Little Crakehall, Toend Butts (cleared from Burstall Wood) all refer to the felling and burning of ancient woodland. The first survey of the village after Domesday was made on the death of the Lord of the Manor, Robert Tatershale, in 1298. By that time the lord's demesne farm alone contained 120 acres of arable and 24 acres of meadow, while his tenants were farming a further 26 or 27 bovates of arable (over 250 acres) and meadow in Great Crakehall. By 1374 yet more land was in cultivation, now amounting to a total of well over 500 acres, with over 80 acres of meadow, in Great Crakehall alone. A gift of land by the lord of the manor of Little Crakehall to Easby Abbey in the fourteenth century shows how far cultivation had eaten into the outlying land by then. It included arable land in Lundflatt and Tendelhou east of the road from Crakehall to Langthorne- that is, in the region of Kirkbridge. These field names, too, show that the land had been cleared from woodland.
This process continued into the senenteenth century - in the Survey of 1630 we read of 40 acres of land encroached from Nomans Moor by John Jackson. This had been done since the previous Survey of 1602.

3. The open fields

The 13th to 15th century surveys of Great Crakehall show that the villagers were cultivating increasing amounts of land as arable and meadow. At this time, and until the end of the sixteenth century, the arable land lay in huge open fields, divided into flatts of 30-50 acres. These were communally farmed: each farmer used an allotted number of long, narrow ploughed strips (in the region of a quarter to half an acre) locally called lands or riggs because of their ridged appearance caused by turning the soil towards the centre of the strip during ploughing. The shallow ditches between the riggs provided drainage, and where the flatt lay on sloping ground the riggs were usually ploughed so that they drained down the slope. Fossilised riggs, preserved in grassland that has never been deep-ploughed since medieval times, can still be seen in a few places in Crakehall. They are particularly clear (1989) in the fields (called Cringle) between Greengates Lane and Crakehall Mill. Older, possibly Anglo-Saxon, plough strips (lynchets) can be seen in one of the fields between Pasture House and the beck, immediately above the steep valley side. Here, the strips have been ploughed across the slope so that every furrow is turned in the same direction, leading to terracing of one flat strip above the next. See pictures HERE. The banks between are reinforced with stones.

The names of some of the flatts of the open fields have survived in later field names - dogflatt, gallowflatt, riddings, in Great Crakehall; lowflatt , moorflatt in Little Crakehall. We can get a rough idea of their positions from the great survey of Crakehall made in 1624 but no old maps survive to show their boundaries. What we know about the open fields comes from seventeenth century documents, particularly the Survey of Crakehall, made in 1624, and a survey and rental of the land in Crakehall that had belonged to Coverham Abbey made a few years earlier. Between them they describe almost all of Great Crakehall. There were about 380 acres of land in three open fields, called East Field, Gill Field and Scrogg Field, of about equal size. From references to the names of later fields, and to fields called raines, meaning boundaries of the open fields, we can get a good idea of where the fields were. They are shown in Map 1.

A document describing the enclosure of Hollow Moor in the north of Little Crakehall in 1612 and a description of the Lordship of Middleham's farms in Little Crakehall in the 1624 survey, give enough information about the open fields of Little Crakehall to show that there were four open fields, called the Little, West, Moor and Greengate Fields, of about 60 acres each. In both villages it is possible that there were originally only two fields, and that during the rapid expansion of cultivation in the 14th century extra fields (Scrogg Field in Great Crakehall, Moor and Greengate Fields in Little Crakehall) were formed by taking more outlying rough grazing (moor or waste) land into cultivation.

From earliest times there were smaller, hedged fields cultivated by individual farmers or small groups. These assarts were enclosed as they were cleared from the waste, and in early deeds they are described in terms of acres of land instead of the term bovates used for open field holdings. At least 100 acres of land were in these small fields (closes) in the 14th century. By 1600 all the more substantial tenant farmers had one or more of these awncient closes. Those we can identify were all at the edges of the open fields - at the Sinks and Sandhill closes on the western boundary and at Lunds and Lady closes in the east, next to Low Wood. Lunds Close and a close taken from Burstall Wood, belonging to Lady Neville (probably the one later called Lady Close) are mentioned as early as 1374. In Little Crakehall the Clarke family had an enclosed field called Horsefold on the edge of Hollow Moor.

Beyond the fringes of the open fields and the assarted closes lay large areas of rough pasture - the Scroggs and Nomans Moor along the low ridge south of the villages, and Hollow Moor in the northernmost part of Little Crakehall. In medieval times these were shared with nearby villages. Cowling used the Scroggs, Cowling, Thornton Watlass and Newton le Willows shared Nomans Moor, and Hollow Moor belonged jointly to Hackforth and Little Crakehall. In the Manor Court Rolls of 1450 we read of farmers cutting bracken in the Scroggs and a description in the 16th century gives an idea of the state of this land a hundred years later: every tenant did know his several parts of braks, and every said part was marked by merks or dowles. Even though the pasture was apportioned among the farmers, at least part of it was still covered in bracken, which was mown for animal bedding and fertiliser.

There were areas of pasture and meadow of much higher quality in both Great and Little Crakehall. Both villages had an ox pasture of good quality grassland, in which grazing was carefully regulated, to support the plough oxen that were used well into the eighteenth century. The oxpastures lay on either side of the beck, between the villages and Kirkbridge. The present Kirkbridge road, and what is now a public footpath from the church corner of the village green to Kirkbridge, led to the Great Crakehall oxpasture, later called Low Pasture. Greengates lane led through the Little Crakehall oxpasture south of the Greengate Field. In addition, the Lord of the Manor in Great Crakehall had an enclosed sheep pasture called Crakehall Cote, where the present Cote House Farm is. He also had some enclosed pasture and meadow fields belonging to his demesne farm - a meadow called Muryels and a pasture called Tadeholme, each of about 16 acres, and two meadows called Saundson Close and East Hagg that had been reclaimed from the edge of the East Hagg wood. The village farmers had a sheepfold in Scrogg pasture and a common sheeprack on Nomans Moor.

4. Woodland

IN PREPARATION

5. Houses in the village

Modern archaeology has revealed that Anglo-Saxon settlements were seldom neat clusters of houses of the kind we think of as the traditional English village. Houses were scattered over a considerable area and were often rebuilt on new sites. There is growing archaeological evidence that villages like Great Crakehall, with a formal arrangement round a green, were planned villages, laid out as complete units at some time following the Norman conquest. While ancient documents tell us a lot about the fields, moors and woods of the village, they do not say much about the village and its houses. The edges of the open fields and the lines of the old lanes, including Blind Lane between the bridge and the present Station Road, show that in medieval times the houses occupied the general area of the modern village, though the first documentary evidence for the existence of the village green in Great Crakehall dates from 1624, when it had exactly its present form. However, the garden of Crakehall House has been a garden since at least the 14th century, called Chapel Garth, showing that the village arrangement on that side is medieval. The main part of the green, and the house sites around it, almost certainly date from some time in the 200 years between the Harrying of the North by the Normans and the first documentary account of the village, in 1298, when Sir Roger de Tatershale had his own manorial farm there and at least 30 families of tenants. We can be sure that there would not be farmhouses like Pasture House, Mudfield, High Scroggs, the Grange, Burtree, Hunters Hill and Greengates out in the fields. The fields were in common occupation by all the farmers. The farmhouses were in the village around the green. Many of them had names: Baldhous, Stanhous, Dogesonhous, Buckhouse and a barn called Assebylathe are all mentioned in the manor court rolls of 1450. Although no descriptions of these houses survive, various reports about house repairs in the manor court rolls give an idea of the way they were built. Most of them were timber framed and the tenants had the right to get timber, with the permission of the bailiff, from the Hagg and Burstall woods, for house repairs. We hear of a house and barn with rotten sills (sills or syles were the upright cruck timbers), of the forester's house having defective timberwork, and of a little house for which the timber is now erected and the walls have been provided with covering. Wattling for the walls is mentioned several times - the timber frames would be walled with clay on woven willow stems, called wattle and daub. Roofs were thatched. With a good supply of building stone, magnesian limestone from the quarries in Little Crakehall and Well, it is likely that it started to replace wattle walls fairly early, but the basic timber frames remained. A few of these have survived in the villages: the Yorkshire Vernacular Buildings Group found that underneath the stone walls of Mr. Pounder's farmhouse in the west end of Great Crakehall (Hall Farm in 18th century deeds) was the timber framework of a substantial yeoman's house of the 15th century, while the old dairy adjoining it had a timber cruck frame. Remains of a timber frame, later clad in stone, also appeared when part of the house on the site of the present High Barns in Little Crakehall was demolished.

Timber framed buildings were still being erected in the late 16th century. In a court case about the illegal felling of Burstall Wood the village carpenter, Luke Jackson, gave evidence that Myles Metcalfe of Little Crakehall had built a house of two pairs of syles which was not yet thatched or walled. Other evidence suggests that Metcalfe intended this only as a cow house.

There were a few stone buildings from the earliest times. The village had a common bakehouse where villagers took meat and bread to be baked; it is mentioned as early as 1374 and its stonework needed repair several times in the 1450s. It was still in use in 1624, situated in the north west corner of the green, next to a smithy. The name of William Ascough's farm near Rand, Stainhouse or Stanhous, means stone house, and dates from the 14th century. In the 1460s the bailiff's accounts for the manor show the lord of the manor paying John Appulton and John Borell 6 shillings and 6 pence for getting stone slates from Leyburn quarry and 5 pence per day for using them to re-roof the lord's stables, a dovecote, the corn mill and the Stainhouse. Roofing flags were so heavy they could only have been used on stone-walled buildings. Skilled stonemasons were in demand for high class building work at this time - for work on the manor house and for the construction of the fine ashlar foundation course of the wheelhouse that still survives at the water mill, for example. But without doubt the most notable piece of work by a Crakehall mason is Catterick parish church. Amazingly the contract for its construction, for the Burgh family of Brough Hall, has survived in the Lawson family papers at North Yorkshire County Record Office, and it records the indenture between Dame Katherine Burgh and Richard of Cracall, mason, for the entire contract. The work was to take no longer than 3 years and Richard was paid 180 marks (120 pounds) and a gown that had belonged to Dame Katherine's late husband.

All the medieval documents, from 1298 onwards, mention the capital messuage, that is, the manor house, in Great Crakehall. Since Great Crakehall never had a resident lord of the manor until late in the 17th century, the manor house would have been the home and office of the bailiff, and the lord's lodgings when he visited the village. We have no direct evidence that it stood on the present site of the Hall, though the fact that the fields behind the hall were called Horse Park in the 16th century suggests that this was where the Duke of Gloucester had his Crakehall horse stud in the 15th century, and a site close to the manor house would be appropriate. No manor house or capital messuage appears in documents between 1450 and 1660. The ancient building had either gone, or become an ordinary house. However, a capital messuage is mentioned again when the village was owned by the Place and Goddard families in 1670 -1700 and this must have been part of the present Hall, for Mary Turner bought it in 1732 and the present front of the Hall was added by her to a much older building. The very back of the Hall seems to be architecturally of the 18th century too. However, the middle part, very much hidden by these two additions, could be much older. It resembles in style the ancient manor house at Well, and in that part of the house some of the walls are 5 feet thick.