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Medieval Beeston

A Saxon Origin
The origins of the settlement of Beeston are obscure. The name would appear to be derived from two Old English words meaning 'farmstead in the rough (or bent) grass'. Old English was the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, which suggests that modern Beeston grew out of land they occupied, perhaps as early as the 7th century AD.

Domesday Beeston
The picture becomes little clearer when we look at t the Domesday Survey compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086. Mention is made of woodland and pasture but overall the manor is described as 'waste'. No villagers or buildings are mentioned, but this may not mean that there was no-one there at the time. Domesday is after all a revenue document. If the inhabitants presented no source of income then they would not be mentioned. In this context waste merely means unproductive.

Before the Conquest the land was held by two Saxon noblemen, Thorsteinn and Morfari. After the Conquest William gave the manor to Ilbert de Lacy as part of a vast collection of estates administered from Pontefract Castle. However, the fact that the manor was shared between two landlords in the Saxon period suggests that it was always considered as having two distinct halves. This is reflected in later medieval times when Beeston became two separate manors, Beeston itself and Cad Beeston, or Beeston Hill as it is known today.

Cad Beeston
Beeston Hill contains what is one of the oldest standing domestic structures in South Leeds. This is a building in Temple Crescent now known as the Manor House, part of which is the timber-framed solar (living quarters) of a late medieval house. Tree ring dating indicates that the timbers were cut down in the early part of the 15th century.


The Church of St Mary
The present St Mary's Church is a Victorian rebuild of a much earlier structure. Old drawings of the church show a small building with a bell turret at the west end. It is unclear when the original structure was built. However, there is a clue to be found in the form of a reconstructed arch in the vestry. The stones of this arch are carved with a zigzag design typical of the mid 12th century.

The original structure was probably only a chapel of ease, a place where the inhabitants of Beeston could go to hear mass. For baptisms, marriages and burials they would still have had to go to the parish church at Leeds.

An early Hospital
The chapel was not the only religious institution in Beeston in the medieval period. A boundary document of 1233 mentions a hospital situated on the Beeston side of what is now Millshaw Beck. This establishment would probably have been run by monks or nuns, but would not be a hospital in the modern sense of the word. Little medical care was offered in such places. They were closer to what we would now recognize as almshouses where people lived on the charity of others.

Stank Hall Barn
Another late medieval building does still remain in the southern part of Beeston. This is Stank Hall Barn which stands next to the Leeds – Wakefield railway line and will be familiar to many commuters. The barn has a distinctive timber frame which rests on a low sill wall to keep the bottom of the wooden frame out of the damp. This prevents it rotting away. Inside, the barn has a double row of posts to support a heavy stone slab roof. In medieval times these were known as thackstones – literally thatch stones. Nowadays we hear the word thatch and we think instinctively of a house roofed with reeds. To the medieval mind thatch was anything that went on the roof. It didn't matter whether it was stone or reeds. It was still thatch.

Barns needed to be extremely large before the invention of steam-powered harvesting and threshing machinery in the late 19th century. Nowadays grain is stored in silos, but in the medieval period wheat was stored in the barn in sheaves. Threshing wheat – separating the grain from the chaff by beating it with wooden flails - was an indoor job that could be done throughout the winter. To prevent the separated grains from rolling away a heavy wooden beam would be placed at the bottom of the open doorway. This was known as a threshold and is still the name which we give to the sill of our household doors today.

The beginnings of an industrial community
Industry came early to Beeston as a series of field names around Stank Hall suggest. Two of these fields are called Cinderhills on an estate map of 1771. This is probably a reference to piles of slag or other waste materiel. Two other fields have Oliver as part of their names. This is not a man's name but a type of machine, a large hammer used to break up iron ore for smelting. The name Stank itself may also be significant. A Stank is an artificial pond and the name is likely to go back to the medieval period. Taken together these names would suggest that there was a medieval smelting works at Stank Hall where a water powered hammer was used to break up the ore. Given the difficulties of transporting goods in the medieval period the ore was probably also mined locally as was the coal for the smelting process itself. By the time the first six inch to the mile Ordnance Survey map of Beeston appeared in the 1850s, the area around the village was dotted with features described as Old Coal Pits. Even then Beeston was well on its way to becoming an industrial suburb of Leeds.

There's lot more information about local places on the WYAAS website at: www.archaeology.wyjs.org.uk Have a look today. You never know what you might find.