Bryony’s map from her article (see above) shows the parishes of Harpham and Burton Agnes with the site of their churches and their dedications labelled. It also shows two historic townships to the east of Burton Agnes and a third township Gransmoor to the south, this last entirely on The R. Hull valley floodplain. The shaded area shows the extent of the historic common land, much disputed during the Middle Ages (such a situation was not unusual, for another example see my History of Hessle Common in section three of this website).
Bryony tells us that medieval Burton Agnes was a multi-township, multi-manor parish, Harpham, like Gransmoor, Haisthorpe and Thornholme (see above) was a township of Burton Agnes, albeit the largest one. Burton Agnes and Harpham developed as villages while the other three remained hamlets, these facts confirmed by the Poll Tax returns of 1377 and by the Hearth Tax returns of 1674, by which time the nucleated hamlets had contracted in area and in population totals.
As is commonly the pattern with parishes along spring lines at the base of the dip and scarp slopes of the Wolds escarpment in Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire four of our townships spanned the lower wold slope and extended onto the floodplain thus potentially benefitting from a variety of topographies, soils and natural vegetation (for a study of a very similar situation see Aspects of the History of the Low Villages in section three of this website).
At the time of ‘Domesday Survey’ Burton Agnes was at the centre of a large estate which included berewicks and sokeland ( for some attempt at a definition of the former see History of Hessle Common in section three of this website in relation to the berewick of Myton). The whole territorial unit had, before the Norman Invasion, been owned by Morcar, a late Anglo-Saxon baron. The last single Norman baron to own the whole unit died in 1199 leaving in his will the estate split between two sisters Alice and Agnes which, as might be expected, is when the territorial disputes began!
(to be continued).