Place:Crowle, Lincolnshire, England

source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names

source: Family History Library Catalog

the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Crowle is a small town and civil parish on the Isle of Axholme in North Lincolnshire, England. It lies on the Stainforth and Keadby Canal and has a railway station. The town includes its suburb of Windsor.

Notable buildings in the town include the parish church, in which can be seen the Crowle Stone runic cross shaft, and the Gothic revival market hall.

A Vision of Britain through Time states that Crowle was located in the West Riding of Yorkshire until 1871. It was part of the Strafforth and Tickhill Wapentake which covered the southwest corned of the county. Once it became part of Lincolnshire, it was an urban district from 1894 until 1936 when it lost its urban district status and became a parish in the Isle of Axholme Rural District.

In 1974 the rural district was abolished and transferred to the new Boothferry District in the county of Humberside under the Local Government Act 1972. Since the demise of Humberside in 1996 it has been part of the unitary authority of North Lincolnshire.

History

This is the second half of the section in Wikipedia. The first half describes the archaeological period.

The town declined in the late Middle Ages (14th and 15th centuries). Historians believe this could be for a number of reasons. The end of the warm climatic period resulted in an expansion of the marshland, with die-back of many trees on the wetter land. Two villages to the north, Haldenby and Waterton, were totally deserted in this period. Possibly the Black Death affected the town but what was probably more important was the switch of trade patterns; the fair declined and the growth of Hull may have pulled trade from Crowle as it did to Beverley. Silting of the River Don began to interfere with trade and shipping but was not corrected.

In the 1620s the Dutch engineer Vermuyden was hired by regional authorities to drain the land, turning a productive marsh-based peasant economy into a less productive arable system. It was not until the late 18th century that the land was drained properly.

Crowle, together with the whole of the northern part of the Isle of Axholme, thrived in the 19th century. Effective drainage, the steam pump, and warping the land (controlled flooding to deposit silt and nutrients) to increase fertility, resulted in better crops and a massive growth in population. Census records suggest some migration from outside the region, including an Irish population.

After 1870 the town went into a sharp decline, as foreign competition in the meat and corn markets was coupled with bad harvests and animal diseases. The population fell from about 3500 to 2500 in 1890.

Since the late 20th century, the town has had major expansion, with residential developments on Mill Hill, Wharf Road, Field Side and Godnow Road. Several infill redevelopments of old farm buildings in the older part of the town have occurred.

Research Tips

• Maps provided online by A Vision of Britain through Time show all the parishes and many villages and hamlets. (Small local reorganization of parishes took place in the 1930s led to differences between the latter two maps.):

• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map of 1888 with Poor Law Union divisions
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map of 1900 with early Rural District divisions (The best for WeRelate purposes, but the parish names are very hard to read.)
• Lincolnshire Ordnance Survey Map, revised 1937 with later Rural District divisions

• The National Library of Scotland [1] also provides a large number of maps for all the counties and districts of England as well as those of Scotland. Their maps of England only cover modern placenames, but they do allow the user to view a parish in relation to its neighbours. These maps are very easy to read.
• FindMyPast now has a large collection of Lincolnshire baptisms, banns, marriages and burials now available to search by name, year, place and parent's names. This is a pay website. (blog dated 16 Sep 2016)
• GENUKI's page on Lincolnshire's Archive Service gives addresses, phone numbers, webpages for all archive offices, museums and libraries in Lincolnshire which may store old records and also presents a list entitled "Hints for the new researcher" which may include details of which you are not aware. These suggestions are becoming more and more outdated, but there's no telling what may be expected in a small library.
• GENUKI also has pages of information on individual parishes, particularly ecclesiastical parishes. The author may just come up with morsels of information not supplied in other internet-available sources.
• Deceased Online now has records for 11 cemeteries and two crematoria in Lincolnshire. This includes Grimsby's Scartho Road cemetery, Scartho Road crematorium, and Cleethorpes cemetery, council records for the City of Lincoln and Gainsborough, and older church records from The National Archives for St Michael's in Stamford, and St Mark's in Lincoln, dating back to 1707. This is a pay website.

Lincolnshire is very low-lying and land had to be drained for agriculture to be successful. The larger drainage channels, many of which are parallel to each other, became boundaries between parishes. Many parishes are long and thin for this reason.

There is much fenland in Lincolnshire, particularly in the Boston and Horncastle areas. Fenlands tended to be extraparochial before the mid 1850s, and although many sections were identified with names and given the title "civil parish", little information has been found about them. Many appear to be abolished in 1906, but the parish which adopts them is not given in A Vision of Britain through Time. Note the WR category Lincolnshire Fenland Settlements which is an attempt to organize them into one list.

From 1889 until 1974 Lincolnshire was divided into three administrative counties: Parts of Holland (southernmost), Parts of Kesteven and Parts of Lindsey (northernmost). These formal names do not fit with modern grammatical usage, but that is what they were, nonetheless. In 1974 the northern section of Lindsey, along with the East Riding of Yorkshire, became the short-lived county of Humberside. In 1996 Humberside was abolished and the area previously in Lincolnshire was made into the two "unitary authorities" of North Lincolnshire and North East Lincolnshire. The remainder of Lincolnshire was divided into "non-metropolitan districts" or "district municipalities" in 1974. Towns, villages and parishes are all listed under Lincolnshire, but the present-day districts are also given so that places in this large county can more easily be located and linked to their wider neighbourhoods. See the WR placepage Lincolnshire, England and the smaller divisions for further explanation.