Place:Broxton Hundred, Cheshire, England

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NameBroxton Hundred
TypeHundred
Located inCheshire, England

Broxton Hundred was formed from the old "Dudestan hundred" of the Domesday era. The southern part of Dudestan was transferred to Wales where it was known as Maelor Saesneg, and (later still) "Flintshire Detached" (see Wikipedia)

A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Broxton Hundred from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:

"The hundred lies around the township [of Broxton]; marches with Flint and Denbigh; and is cut into two divisions, East and West. The E. division contains six parishes and parts of eight other parishes. Acres, 32,515. The W. division contains five parishes and parts of five other parishes. Acres, 42,435. Population of both, 18,499. Houses, 3,540."

NOTE: The list of parishes in Broxton Hundred as taken from A Vision of Britain through Time which also includes a township named Overchurch and the following observation:

"Neither the GB Historical GIS nor the Cheshire Record Office (e-mail from Caroline Picco, Archivist, 23/8/2010) have been able to identify this second Overchurch, so we conclude it is an error by Youngs. N.B. Broxton Hundred was south and east of Chester, while the well-known Overchurch in Cheshire is in the Wirrall."

(F. Youngs, Local Administrative Units: Northern England is their reference for the data.) The parish of Overchurch in Broxton Hundred has been removed for WeRelate purposes.

It is also noted that the parishes of Chester St. Mary on the Hill and Chester St. Oswald are listed both under the Wirral Hundred and here under Broxton Hundred. In each case all the townships within the parish are listed without any indication of the Hundred in which they were located.

Ancient Parishes

(Source: "A Vision of Britain through Time", but see note above.) The Chester churches in the list held lands outside the borough itself.

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

The Hundreds of Cheshire, as with other Hundreds in England were the geographic divisions of the historic county for administrative, military and judicial purposes. They were introduced in Cheshire some time before the Norman conquest. Later on, both the number and names of the hundreds changed by processes of land being lost from Cheshire, and merging or amalgamation of remaining hundreds.

Chester was an ancient borough, not linked to any hundred, quite often referred to as a "county of itself".

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Hundreds of Cheshire.

Image:Cheshire hundreds circa 1868.png

Research Tips

Definitions

  • See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes (known as ancient parishes) were ecclesiastical, under the jurisdiction of the local priest and his bishop. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets that never became independent civil parishes, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
  • Rural districts were groups of geographically close civil parishes in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish. Inspecting the archives of a rural district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
  • Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.

Helpful Sources

  • Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
  • FamilySearch Cheshire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
  • The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
  • The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
  • A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
  • Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.

Maps

  • Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
  • The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
  • The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.
  • For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Hundreds of Cheshire. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.