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Swallow is a small village and civil parish in the West Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England, on the A46 road north-east from Caistor. The population (including Cabourne and Cuxwold) taken at the 2011 census was 289. It is 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast from Caistor. A Vision of Britain through Time provides the following description of Swallow from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72:
[edit] History
[edit] EtymologyThe name Swallow has been variously written as Sualan (Domesday Book), Suawa, Swalwe and Swalewe (all twelfth century). The Oxford Dictionary of Place Names equates the name with Swale, suggesting that the village is called after a fast-moving river of that name, with eau being French for water. Bob Willey, who used to live in the village, put forward the theory that it is closer to the German schwall, meaning "flood" and suggesting that water gathered on the clay bottom land below the fast-draining chalky hills. [edit] Early historyArchaeological finds, including flint tools at Swallow Vale Farm, indicate the presence of early settlements in Swallow. Other traces include cropmark traces of four possible barrows, a pit and a boundary ditch on Cuxwold Road, and similar barrows behind Grange Farm and on the eastern edge of the village south of Grimsby Road. Straddling the Limber parish border are the remains of an undated ring ditch in Swallow Wold Wood. Further finds include Roman pottery and coins, and the apparent remains of a Saxon leather worker. Ridges found in the field above the skeleton are further indications of a pre-Norman conquest settlement. [edit] Middle AgesThe Domesday Book does not mention Swallow in detail, but in 1086 Lincolnshire was remote from the rest of the kingdom: cut off from the south by the undrained Fens, and occupied by hostile and rebellious Danes (Vikings). At this time, Swallow consisted of at least 35 households. In Swallow the important landowners were Norman (the Bishop of Bayeux was William the Conqueror's half-brother Odo of Bayeux), though low in the Norman hierarchy. Others mentioned in Domesday include Sualan (Archbishop of York), Count Alan, Roger de Poitou and Alfred of Lincoln. By the 13th century Count Alan's manor had passed into the hands of the Lascelles family, who may have been resident landlords and were closely involved with the parish church. Their successors, the Conyers family, were certainly non-resident. From around 1200 the manor of Swallow was held by the Augustinian abbey of Wellow in Grimsby. The Cistercian nuns of Nuncotham also had a holding, as did Thornton Abbey and Saint Leonard's Priory (Grimsby) by the time of the Reformation. In 1530 George St. Pol bought the former Lascelles Manor, and in 1543 he acquired the former abbey lands from John Bellewe and Robert Brocklesby, to whom they had been granted following the Dissolution of the Monasteries. A survey in the early 14th recorded that Swallow had 26 households and 31 taxpayers, while a Poll Tax count in 1372 found 110 people over the age of fourteen. There were 18 taxpayers in 1525 but only 12 in 1543, and 20 households in 1563. These numbers remained fairly constant for the next three centuries. Apart from the church, there are no obvious reminders of the medieval village. On closer examination, a few earthworks show a village of two centres. To the west there was a series of narrow closes and yards fronting Caistor Road with a back lane near where the present A46 runs. This and the ploughing strips are cut through by the much later Limber Road. Towards the end of the medieval period there were further closes on the south side of the road running down to the stream. The Eastern Settlement shows signs of one or more monastic farms, a moated manor site and a mill. [edit] EnclosureSwallow dates from the 19th century enclosure. Until 1805 the majority of villagers had strips in two large fields, as well as grazing rights on the wold, the moor and in Horse Pasture. However, this system started to lose viability as early as the Tudor period. From the mid 17th century, some Swallow residents described themselves as farmers rather than cottagers. By the end of the 18th century, improved agricultural methods and animal husbandry, together with the need to move from subsistence farming to large-scale food production for growing numbers of city and town dwellers, made change inevitable. Swallow was enclosed by parliamentary act in 1805, and the award was completed in 1809. Apart from two small parcels awarded to the Bishop of Lincoln and Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Rector's Glebe of , virtually all the land was awarded to Lord Yarborough. The Rector received corn rents in lieu of tithes. There were also about in the village and around the church which were old enclosure, and were for roads. Within a few years, farms which still exist today – Vale, Wold, Mount, Grange and Rookery – had been built. Hedges were planted, new roads and lanes were built, and Lord Yarborough had begun the tree planting which so radically altered the countryside. At enclosure, and for some time afterwards, Swallow's houses were simple, single-storey buildings of mud and stud. These were gradually replaced by brick cottages, with the majority of those on Grimsby Road and Chapel Lane being built around 1875. Of the 45 houses in Swallow listed in the 1881 census, about two thirds survive. In early 2008, a housing development project was completed in the village on the meadow by the beck. [edit] Parish registers and censusThe parish registers date back to 1671. It was rare for a family to remain in the village for more than two generations, and the majority of labourers moved on after a few years to get a better job or to leave farming. Even the better off farmers tended (being tenants rather than owners) to remain no more than two or three generations. In the spring of 1841, during the Hungry Forties, fourteen children (about a quarter of all the village's children) died. No adults died that year. In 1870, a further six children died, the last two of scarlet fever. The registers also record the burial, in 1909, of an unknown man whose decayed remains had been found after 2–12 years' exposure. The 1851 census shows 127 males and 90 females in 57 households. Ten years later the number of dwellings had reduced to 41 while the population had risen by 22. The 1881 census shows 78% of all working males in farming, with 16% in allied trades – 92% in total. Of the adults, only 10% were born in Swallow, although only three were born outside Lincolnshire. [edit] Research Tips
The south of 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 (in the southeast), Parts of Kesteven (in the southwest) and Parts of Lindsey (in the north of the county). 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.
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