PONTEFRACT

AND ITS NAME.

FROM the junction at Castleford of the two important Yorkshire rivers, the Aire and Calder, till they finally join the Humber, their united stream takes a very serpentine course, traversing a distance of rather more than double the length of a straight line from one place to the other. Their direction is generally easterly, and almost identical with that of the Calder; but before they finally adopt that course they make two remarkable bends, one to the north between Castleford and Brotherton, and one to the south between Brotherton and Beale. With the latter, however, which encloses the magnificent site occupied by Byram Hall and Park, we have no immediate concern; our present purpose is entirely with the former, which passes round three remarkable hills forming the angles of an equilateral triangle upon a base of about two thousand yards. Upon one of these hills, naturally of a conical form, made almost cylindrical by artificial means, stands Pontefract Castle; upon another, which is of a long barrow-like shape, stands what is now called

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Pre-Historic Pontefract.

Holywell* Wood; the third, which forms the Park Ridge and the Park Hill, is the site of the reservoir which supplies the town of Pontefract with water.

Between Holywell Wood, which is on the skirts of the limestone, and Castle Hill, which is entirely of sandstone, lie a series of smaller elevations, such as Ridgely Hill and Fairy Hill, each of sandstone; and nearly between Park Hill and Castle Hill is a second series of elevations, upon one of which stands Pontefract town; these are also of sandstone; while between Holywell Wood and the Park Hill is a deep natural valley from which the sandstone has been carried, evidently by denudation. The valley is probably the site of an ancient arm of the sea, which in comparatively recent geological ages received the rivers Aire and Calder; but as this is a matter which concerns the more ancient history of the district we refrain from any present speculation upon it; we seek now to deal only with the development of Pontefract under the hand of man.

There is no actual evidence that any other part of this district was inhabited by pre-historic man, though the hill on which stands Holywell Wood, and that which supports the ruins of Pontefract Castle, each

From the Holy Well situate just within the eastern border of the wood. There are two other wells in the neighbourhood of the town to which, judging from their names, sacred virtues have at some time been attributed, Halliwell on the site of the Roman Catholic Chapel, in Tanshelf, and St. Ives Well, very near the old road from Pontefract to Castleford; but to neither of them have we been able to attach the smallest traditionary history.

British Pontefract.

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bears upon its face the marks of a very early race. It is indeed exceedingly probable, that when the painted savage was the only human inhabitant of this island, what is now called Pontefract was a settlement of one of the most considerable of their tribes; but very little evidence of the local connection of the warlike Brigantes with the district has been as yet unearthed, notwithstanding this presumed existence of their camps both here and on the neighbouring hill of Glass Houghton. Nor has the name survived by which they called their location; though that which has been immemorially given to the neighbouring township just named,* and those which they gave to the two rivers Aire and Calder, attest to this day the fact of their presence in the locality.

The Romans, the successors of this pre-historic race, inaugurated a thoroughly new state of things; as much so as if they had completely extirpated the

The name Houghton (the prefix Glass is of a very recent date) is evidently derived from the word houe, a burying-place on a hill. Houghton would therefore signify a Saxon ton or village near a British houe or burying-place; as Street-houses would be the Saxon village on the Roman road or street near a similar British houe, the amalgamation of the Celtic word houe equally with the Roman word Street, and with the Saxon word ton, showing that the Saxon inhabitants accepted both the Celtic and the Roman names of places which they found in use. In this connection it may be remarked that throughout a very wide district in the northern and midland counties of England wherever the word haw, or hough, or houe, or barrow, or lough, or low, or law, is found, as the name or part of the name of a place, there will be a hill which may be reasonably suspected to have been utilised in pre-historic times as a burying-place. In Yorkshire, the name is generally built upon the imperfect diphthong ou, in the Midlands upon au; but this is evidently a mere dialectical difference.

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Roman Pontefract.

ancient inhabitants, or had either driven them entirely away, or compelled them to go further inland. These new-comers probably adapted the old British paths to their own purposes, and their street (the WatlingStreet) can still be very easily traced in the present road from Doncaster to Barnsdale, thence across the Went by Standing Flat Bridge, through East Hardwick, and by the west side of the original Pontefract Park (now the Pontefract Park District), to Castleford, from which place it continues in a northern direction to Aberford and Tadcaster; while branches from it extended in several other directions in the neighbourhood of the town of Pontefract,

Although, as we have said, the names given by the Brigantes to the rivers, and those which they gave to Houghton, and to a few other places in the neighbourhood, have survived in one form or another until now, that by which they called Pontefract has utterly perished, as has also the name given by the Romans to their station here.

Other marks of Roman rule are more numerous; a Roman lachrymatory having been in 1869 dug out of a quarry of fresh water sand of late Roman deposit, in which the remains of Bos Primogenius and Bos Longifrons had been previously found, and numerous shards of pot having been unearthed in the neighbourhood, especially on the top of the Park Hill, when the excavations were being made for the reservoir, while Roman coins are frequently found in the locality.

Saxon Pontefract.

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And although the discovery of money, either in single pieces or in hoards, really proves nothing, inasmuch as single pieces may be dropped anywhere, and hoards of money would generally be buried so that protection might be obtained from concealment, and therefore far away from the abode of the owner; yet it may be well to notice that about twenty years ago as many as 500 copper coins of the age of Constantine, were found in a single urn near where the Roman street, to which we have referred, crosses the present road from the Park Gates to Featherstone.

But notwithstanding that the Romans thus left traces of their presence here in the form of the current coin in common use among them, in the even more permanent roads which they constructed, and in the fragments of vessels which they used, they seem to have been as it were merely visitors to the place, and when they departed they left neither name, nor political institutions, nor even the memory of any historical event that had happened under their domination. It was not indeed till the year 625, nearly two centuries after the departure of those conquerors of the early Britons, that the town now called Pontefract rose into historic importance, and received the name which is still in existence as that of the so long separated township of Tanshelf, recently brought again within the bounds of the borough of Pontefract.

* Tada was a modification of the second syllable of Ethelburga, of a kind frequent among the Anglo-Saxons.