Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 130

Longdendale is the eastern and higher part of the Etherow Valley. It rises due east of the Manchester urban complex and runs up into the Peak District National Park. Today it is notable for a string of reservoirs that supply Manchester. In this edition, 14 photographs generously illustrate the varying character of the landscape, from old arable and rolling park land up to open moor. In the fourteenth century Longdendale constituted a lordship centred on Tintwistle, where there was a small borough (not recorded in Beresford and Finberg, but well attested in the records printed here). The lordship was adjacent to the heavily forested lordship of Macclesfield, and one membrane of the Longdendale extents lists the foresters of Macclesfield even though the two lordships were separately administered. In the 1360s Longdendale was in the hands of the Black Prince, who leased it out. Its administrators were responsible for compiling a series of extents, one in about 1357, of which nothing survives, a second in 1360, and a third a few years later. None of these survives in its final form, but a file of documents in The National Archives (SC 11/897) contains advanced drafts of the 1360 extent and its successor. The editors have printed these with a translation, and supply a detailed introduction describing the record and the circumstances of its composition. An appendix contains a summary of the tenancies, which cross-references the different drafts, and a prosopographical index that draws together available information about the 124 people they mention. There are also separate indexes of persons, places and subject. Although the record is a complex one, the editors have done everything in their power to make it intelligible and usable.

There were ten different settlements belonging to the lordship, but because most of them were subinfeudated as manors or parts of manors it is not possible to calculate the total number of households. The lordship rendered a total sum of £35–40 a year, of which about £16 13s. 4d. was from Tintwistle, its mill and the stallage. A further £12 was apparently from pasture rents. Most of the settlements owed only a few shillings. Though these were not for the most part commercial rents, their low valuation, together with the environmental characteristics of Longdendale, suggest that this was a lightly populated region. Its agriculture probably combined extensive pastoral farming with oats and barley cultivation. Tenants owing harvesting services at Arnfield, in the days before these had been commuted for cash payments, had received a daily meal of bread, butter and milk, and those owing ploughing services had expected to receive for each plough a gallon of ale, six herrings and six oatcakes (vj kakes avene). The editors surmise that the last of the three extents recorded here, coming so closely behind that of 1360, was occasioned by the plague epidemic of 1361–2. Even before then there had been depopulation; two burgage tenements in Tintwistle, as well as a couple of other properties there, are described as decayed in 1360, and the editors cross-reference to decays of rent recorded in contemporary account rolls from the lordship. So many of our records come from the wealthier and heavily populated parts of Britain, that it is particularly pleasing to have material in print from a more outlying estate such as this one. It would be interesting to know whether in the longer term Longdendale suffered exceptionally badly from depopulation as a result of its upland terrain, or whether its inhabitants had the resources and enterprise to defy the implications of their ‘marginal’ location.