Place:Middlewich, Cheshire, England

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Middlewich is a town in the unitary authority of Cheshire East in Cheshire, England. It is 19.2 miles (30.9 km) east of the city of Chester, 2.9 miles (4.7 km) east of Winsford, 5.3 miles (8.5 km) southeast of Northwich and 4.7 miles (7.6 km) northwest of Sandbach. The population of the town at the 2011 Census was 13,595.

Middlewich lies on the confluence of three rivers: the Dane, Croco and Wheelock. Three canals also pass through the town, the Shropshire Union, Trent and Mersey, and the Wardle canal, as well as three major roads, the A533, A54 and A530 roads; Middlewich also has good motorway links to the nearby cities of Manchester and Liverpool. The town's population has doubled since 1970 despite a reduction in the number of manufacturing jobs in salt and textile manufacturing, suggesting that many of the new residents live in Middlewich for reasons other than local employment.

GENUKI states:
Middlewich was also a township in Middlewich ancient parish which was situated mostly in the Northwich Hundred, but also in the Eddisbury Hundred. It became a civil parish in 1866. The population was 1,190 in 1801, 1,235 in 1851, 4,669 in 1901, 6,736 in 1951, and 13,101 in 2001.

As an ancient parish Middlewich was in charge of the following townships:

• Byley (or Byley with Yatehouse),
• Clive,
• Croxton,
• Kinderton with Hulme,
• Minshull Vernon,
• Mooresbarrow with Parme,
• Newton (near Middlewich),
• Occlestone,
• Ravenscroft,
• Sproston,
• Stublach,
• Sutton (near Middlewich),
• Wimboldsley,
• Weaver (some sources: Weever) - the only township located in Eddisbury Hundred)

History

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

In the Domesday Book of 1086 Middlewich is spelt "Mildestvich"; a termination wic or wyc in Old English referring to a settlement, village or dwelling. It is also supposed that "wich" or "wych" refers to a salt town, with Middlewich being the middle town between Northwich and Nantwich, both of which were salt producers.

Middlewich was founded by the Romans, who gave it the name Salinae because of its surrounding salt deposits. It became one of the major Roman sites for salt production, an activity that was centred on the township of Kinderton, about a quarter of a mile north of the present-day parish church of St. Michael and All Angels. It has been suggested that pre-Roman salt production also occurred in the same area, but there is no supporting archaeological evidence.^[1][2] Whittaker's History of Manchester claims that the Iron Age Cornovii made Kinderton their capital,^[3] but it is more likely that the Cornovii inhabited Kinderton for its salt-making potential. There was once thought to have been a medieval castle at Kinderton, but that is now thought to have been unlikely.

Middlewich lies across the King Street fault, which roughly follows the Roman road, King Street, from Northwich to Middlewich. During their occupation the Romans built a fort at Harbutts Field, and excavations to the south of the fort have found further evidence of Roman activity including a well and part of a preserved Roman road. An excavation in 2004, in Buckley's Field, also uncovered signs of Roman occupation.

Salt manufacture remained the principal industry for the past 2,000 years, and it has shaped the town's history and geography. Before the Norman invasion of England in 1066, there is thought to have been one brine pit in Middlewich, between the River Croco and the current Lewin Street. In the Domesday Book the area is described as being "wasted", having been cleared by William the Conqueror around 1070 as an "act of rage against his rebellious barons". Gilbert de Venables became the first Baron of Kinderton shortly after the Norman Conquest. A manor house was built to the east of the town and became the baronial seat of the Venables family. A Jacobean screen in the church of St. Michael and All Angels has the carved Venables coat of arms. The title "Baron of Kinderton" is now vested in the Lord Vernon.

On 13 March 1643 the town was the scene of the first Battle of Middlewich, between the Parliamentarians, under Sir William Brereton, and the Royalist supporters of Charles I, under Sir Thomas Aston. The second Battle of Middlewich took place on 26 December 1643, and claimed the lives of about 200 Parliamentarians, along with a number of Royalists under the command of Lord Byron.

The population of Middlewich rose during the 19th and 20th centuries. Some of this rise is attributable to a number of parishes being combined, for example parts of Newton were added to Middlewich in 1894, with Sutton having previously been added to Newton in 1892. The increase may also have been caused by the need to provide a labour force for the production of salt and chemicals by then occurring in the town. In the middle of the 19th century Middlewich was described as a town whose economic importance lay in the surrounding farming district, a silk factory, and the salt works in Kinderton and Newton.

In 1887 the town was described as having an antique appearance, with its principal trade being salt, along with fruit and vegetables, and small silk and heavy cotton works. The town had one bank and one newspaper. By 1911 the Encyclopædia Britannica mentions the existence of chemical works and the manufacture of condensed milk.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article Middlewich. on the 20th century

A further article in Wikipedia entitled "History of Middlewich" deals more with the ancient parish and lists its townships with explanations as to what happened to their linkages to Middlewich from the mid-1700s on.

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.

• The southern part of Cheshire in the 1830s as far north as Nantwich and Crewe on the east and Coddington on the west.
• The Wirral Peninsula in the 1830s
• The whole of Cheshire in 1888 with Sanitary Districts and 19th century civil parishes outlined
• The entire county in 1900 with Rural and Urban Districts. This map locates village, hamlets, churches, roads, railways, canals, industrial sites, manorial estates, etc. Unfortunately the copy of the map available online has been annotated in pencil, making some parishes difficult to inspect.
• 1931-1944 The county, with the numerous revisions to Rural and Urban Districts which occurred in the 1930s. This map locates village and hamlets, but they are more easily seen on the map of 1900.

• 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.