Farnham · History & Heritage
The full history of Farnham — Saxon settlers, Domesday peasants, recusant martyrs, Civil War cannonballs, blind road-builders and the long, gentle business of being a small Yorkshire village for fifteen hundred years.
Farnham is a small, historic village in North Yorkshire, perched on a magnesium limestone ridge approximately two miles north of Knaresborough and five miles north-east of Harrogate. To the west and south-west the land falls away into the low-lying mires and carrs — ancient wetlands — and to the north and east the country opens out into rolling pasture, woodland and the great northern view. It is a place that has been continuously inhabited, in roughly the same shape, for fifteen hundred years.
What follows is the longer version of that story: from the Anglo-Saxons who first cleared the ferns, through the Domesday Book, the Norman lords, the medieval priors, the Catholic recusants, the Civil War, the Victorian restorers and the twentieth-century farmers and factory workers, to the conserved village of today.
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Section OneFarnham’s name is Old English. “Feran-hām” — the homestead among the ferns — tells you both who came here and what they found: Anglo-Saxon settlers, and a band of higher, drier ground rising clear of the bracken-covered carrs below. The settlement most likely dates to the great sixth-century “age of settlements”, the long generations after the Roman withdrawal of c.440 AD when the new English-speaking peoples spread across the north and the old Romano-British countryside was reorganised into hamlets, halls and field-systems. Almost every English village shown on the modern Ordnance Survey was already in place by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066; Farnham is one of these.
The choice of ground was not casual. The village sits on a long, narrow shelf of magnesium limestone — a band of harder rock running roughly north-south through the lower Vale of York. The limestone gave well-drained pasture, walling stone, and a foothold above the wet ground to the west and south-west. Beyond that, all the things a village needs were within easy reach: timber from the surrounding woods, fish from the pools and the Nidd, lime from the local quarry, and the great market town of Knaresborough only two miles away on the river bend.
Then come the Vikings. From the late ninth century the Danelaw remade much of the surrounding country: place-names like Scotton, Brearton, Coneythorpe and Staveley all carry Old Norse echoes. Farnham, with its Old English name, kept its English identity through the long upheaval. By the time the Normans arrive, it is already an old place.
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Section TwoThe first written record of Farnham is in the Domesday Book of 1086, William the Conqueror’s great survey of his new English kingdom. Its entry, in the formulaic Latin of the commissioners, reads in translation:
In Farnham, Gospatric [son of Arnketil] has three carucates of land to be taxed — land to one plough. There is now a priest and a church and one plough. Value in King Edward’s time, ten shillings; now, five shillings. Domesday Book, Yorkshire, 1086
It is a short paragraph, but a great deal can be read out of it. The pre-Conquest landowner, Gospatric, son of Arnketil, was an Anglo-Scandinavian thegn who held a portfolio of around thirty-six manors across the north and who had served as a hostage in one of the uneasy peace pacts between the conquering Normans and the surviving English aristocracy. The fact that a priest and a church are explicitly recorded means that Farnham already had a building dedicated to Christian worship in 1086 — an earlier church on the site of today’s St Oswald’s.
The drop in value, from ten shillings to five, is the most eloquent line. It records the long shadow of the Harrying of the North — William’s deliberate, scorched-earth suppression of the English rebellions of 1069–70. Farms were burnt, livestock killed, the population scattered or starved. Sixteen years later the Yorkshire countryside was still half its former value. Farnham, like its neighbours, was rebuilding from a wound.
Half a mile north of the village, on the rising ground beyond Shaw Beck, stood the great hall that gave the modern parish its name. Walkingham Hall was a substantial twelfth-century manor — the seat of Sir William de Walkingham, recorded as lord of the township in 1273. The Knaresborough antiquary Hargrove, writing in 1800, described an approach through “an avenue of two rows of aged oaks, still discernible”, with “the remains of the stables and offices, with the gardens and fish ponds, very evident” — “it must have been a splendid affair”. Sir William’s sister and heiress married Thomas de Scriven, joining the Walkingham estates to one of the great families of the district; the hall itself slipped into ruin, and yearly ploughing has now removed almost every trace.
A wartime story has survived. During the 1939–45 war an army unit commander on exercises called at nearby Branton Court inquiring after Walkingham Hall — he was seeking accommodation for his men. It was pointed out, gently, that the map showed only the site of the hall, and that for accommodation he was “several centuries adrift”.
The village also had a water mill, attested in a 1226 dispute between John Walkingham and his tenants which refers to “Farnham mill near the stream which comes from the mill on the south side”, and again in 1511 when tenants were ordered to repair the causeway leading to it. The site is most likely the field on the south side of Shaw Beck.
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Section Three
The Domesday church of 1086 has not survived; the building you see today is a layered structure of Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular work, restored once thoroughly in the Victorian age and gently again at the millennium. The clearest description of its phases is the one set down by the Durham architect C. Hodgson Fowler (1840–1910), one of the most respected English church architects of his generation. He surveyed Farnham as part of his diocesan work and wrote:
The chancel is remarkable for its size and dignity; it was built on an unusual scale for so small a church. Its date appears to be about 1180. It is thought that an earlier Norman nave existed at this time but, if so, all trace has been lost. Three bays of the present north aisle were erected about the year 1200 and the south aisle of three bays was added some hundred years later. The south aisle has a peculiar treatment of the junction of arch and pier. About 1330 the south aisle was extended westward by the present, late Decorated arch, but the north aisle does not appear to have been lengthened until about 1480, this arch on the north side being Perpendicular in character. The present low tower (about 1500) was built inside the west end of the nave, its piers being placed inside the nave but not touching its walls. C. Hodgson Fowler · architectural notes
Fowler’s account places the heart of the building in the late twelfth century. Pevsner, writing later, called the chancel “beautiful” — high praise from a critic not given to enthusiasm. The shafted capitals and corbel tables that survive show the late Norman, almost Cistercian sensibility of c. 1180.
One of the most celebrated villains in English history had a direct family connection to this church. When Edward Fawkes died in York in 1578, his widow Edith remarried Denis Bainbridge of Scotton, the next village downriver, and the young Guy Fawkes spent his formative years living in Scotton with his mother and stepfather. Guy’s two sisters, Anne and Elizabeth Fawkes, were both married in St Oswald’s; his stepfather Denis was buried in the churchyard. The Bainbridge–Fawkes family, like the Bickerdikes of Low Hall, belonged to the great body of recusant Yorkshire Catholic gentry who paid steadily, and sometimes dearly, for refusing to abandon the old faith.
It is not certain to what extent the local landscape shaped the man who set the Gunpowder Plot in motion in 1605, but the registers of the church record his stepfather’s burial and his sisters’ weddings, and the parish was familiar ground to him during the years when his religious convictions hardened.
In 1344 the advowson of the church was granted — by Sir William Malbis and others — to Beauvale Priory in Nottinghamshire, a Carthusian house founded the year before, in 1343 — an unusually pure and austere monastic order whose monks lived as solitary hermits within a shared enclosure. The priory drew the rectorial income from Farnham for almost two centuries until Beauvale was suppressed in Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539, when the rectorial rights passed into lay hands.
In 1768 the minister and churchwardens petitioned to have repairs done because the building was in a “ruinous” condition. Some patching was carried out, but it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that a comprehensive restoration was undertaken. In 1854 the work was entrusted to Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), the most prolific church architect of the Victorian age and the man behind St Pancras Station, the Albert Memorial, and over a thousand churches. Scott rebuilt the south wall and porch, reroofed the nave and renewed its windows in the careful Gothic Revival manner of his prime years. Remarkably, the entire cost was met not by public subscription but by the vicar himself, the Rev. Thomas Collins, whose family had been patrons of the church since 1740.
The Rev. Anthony Waterer recorded, in 1956, a conversation he had had two years earlier with a Mrs Bruce of Throstle Nest farmhouse, whose mother-in-law had been ten years old in 1854 and had remembered the day of the re-opening clearly. The girl — Isabella Robinson, of Farnham House — described “horses and carriages all over the green and country gentlemen from all around, and many went, after the opening, to the Crown Inn opposite.” Isabella later married John Thomas Pullan, the schoolmaster, and then on his death married Pearson Bruce; she died in 1922 aged seventy-eight, still living at Throstle Nest.
To celebrate the millennium, in 2000–01 the parish embarked on an extensive programme of internal works: a new York-stone floor, kitchen and toilet facilities, new inner doors, and the installation of the village clock, which now sits on the south face of the tower — a present from the village to its church.
The three bells in the tower are dated 1611, 1631 and 1774 — though Bridger's 1996 study of the village records the earlier pair as both being cast in 1633, suggesting a small disagreement in the records well worth resolving. The 1774 bell carries the inscription “Peake and Chapman, London · Rev. Thos. Collins Vicar · J. Wood Churchwarden 1774”, naming the centenarian John Wood (buried 1787, aged 103) who served as churchwarden for many years.
The parish registers begin in 1569, in the eleventh year of Elizabeth I, and run virtually unbroken to the present — a remarkable continuous record of christenings, marriages and burials over 450 years. The most accessible edition is the transcription by Dr. Francis Collins, Registers of Farnham 1569–1812. Today St Oswald’s forms part of the modern parish of Walkingham Hill, grouped with five sister churches in the surrounding villages.
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Section FourFrom around 1530 to 1799 the Bickerdike family were one of the principal households of the parish, with their seat at Low Hall (occupied from before 1530 until c.1677). The Knaresborough Wills, transcribed by Dr. Francis Collins in 1905, preserve the will of Edward Bickerdike, dated 1530 — the earliest piece of writing from the family that we have. It opens:
I, Edward Bickerdike of Farnham, yeoman, to be beried in my paryshe chyrche yard of Farnham, before the chyrche porche there…
My wyeffe schall fynde a priest, after my decesse, to synge and reyde and pray in Farnham Chyrche dayly and yerly for my soulle… my wyeffe schall fynde the lampe in Farnham Chyrche. Will of Edward Bickerdike of Farnham, 1530
The lamp, the daily prayers, the burial before the porch — this is the religious life of pre-Reformation England, in plain Yorkshire English, written in the last years before Henry VIII broke with Rome. The family kept that faith stubbornly through the storm. In 1586 Robert Bickerdike of Low Hall was executed at York for “being reconciled to the Church of Rome and refusing to go to Church.” He is one of the York Martyrs, and was formally beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1987. A 1604 list of recusants names Anne, Elizabeth and Jane Bickerdike together — a mother and her daughters — under regular fine for refusing the parish church. A century later the family had drifted from Low Hall, and the line ended in Farnham with Elizabeth Bickerdike (1767–1799) who married Colonel Harvey and is memorialised inside the church.
The other great family in Farnham’s story came not from the village itself but from Scriven Hall, a mile away. The Slingsby family — said to be descended from “Gamel, the King’s Fowler” and certainly settled in Scriven from at least the fifteenth century — provided members of parliament for Knaresborough from 1572 to 1645. Sir Henry Slingsby, MP from 1640, was a keen supporter of King Charles and fought for the Royalists at the bloody battle of Marston Moor in 1644; unfortunate to be on the losing side, he was beheaded for treason in 1658. Scriven Hall was confiscated by Cromwell’s government and later recovered for the family by Slingsby Bethel, MP. From the late eighteenth century onwards the Slingsbys steadily bought up Farnham land until by the nineteenth century they were the village’s largest landowners. Their family papers, deposited with the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, remain one of the most important written records of the place.
Daniel Defoe — the same who wrote Robinson Crusoe — proposed, in his economic writing of the 1720s, that English country society could be divided into seven categories:
Bridger maps these onto eighteenth-century Farnham: The Great were the absentee Dukes of Devonshire and Bedfordshire; The Rich the Slingsbys, Stockdales and Bickerdikes; The middle sort the larger working farmers — the Slaters, Squires and Robinsons; The working trades, Smith the blacksmith and Baxter the wheelwright; The poor, the agricultural labourers — the Oxtobys and the Hoods; The miserable, the paupers of the village. His conclusion is that the parish shows “no community of excessive hardship” — harder than now, certainly, but never the misery of the industrial cities.
From 1658 the Oastler family were prominent surveyors based in the village. In 1754, Thomas Oastler of Farnham was appointed Master Surveyor for the construction of the new turnpike road from Harrogate to Boroughbridge, and it was Oastler who awarded the first sub-contract — three miles of road between Minskip and Ferrensby — to a remarkable Knaresborough character. John “Blind Jack” Metcalf (1717–1810) had lost his sight to smallpox at the age of six but had since worked as a horse-dealer, stage-wagon carrier, fiddler, soldier (he had walked from Yorkshire to fight at Culloden) and entrepreneur. He had never built a road in his life.
Bridger’s study suggests an explanation. The Metcalfs of Farnham had been a long-established and respected family in the village for some three centuries; Thomas Oastler and Richard Metcalf of Farnham were both churchwardens of St Oswald’s. Blind Jack was almost certainly related, and his credibility in the village was sufficient that an inexperienced contractor was trusted with public money. The bet paid off. Oastler followed the first contract with a further one for the new bridge over the River Ure at Boroughbridge — stone quarried, as it happened, from Lime Kiln Hill above Farnham, which is now the gravel quarry. Metcalf went on to build around 180 miles of fine, well-drained highway across the north of England between 1754 and 1794. The Oastlers and the Bickerdikes were tied by marriage in 1765, joining the village’s old recusant household to one of its newer professional families.
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Section Five
In the English Civil War (1642–49), Parliamentary troops were quartered in and around Farnham both before and after the great Battle of Marston Moor in July 1644 — the largest battle ever fought on English soil, ten miles to the south, and the turning of the tide against Charles I in the north. The parochial accounts of nearby Clint, in 1648, include the entry:
Eight pence an acre for the provideinge assistant quarter to Capt Goddard and Capt Wolfes troops lyinge at Farnhame. Parochial Accounts, Clint, 1648
So Parliamentary captains were billeted in the village, and cannonballs have since been turned up in the garden at Farnham Lodge — presumably the residue of skirmishes or stray practice rounds. There is a separate Ripley Castle tradition of Lady Ingilby’s celebrated confrontation with Cromwell himself a few miles to the west.
Once the Commonwealth was established, a 1653 Registration Act transferred custody of church registers from the clergy to elected Registrars, and a 1654 Act briefly transferred marriages from clergy to Justices of the Peace. The Farnham vicar of the day, Robert Cundell (who had been vicar since 1629), simply added the Registrar’s job to his existing one; he lived to see both Acts revoked and was restored as Vicar at the Restoration. The Rev. Waterer drily noted finding an entry, in this period, of a marriage conducted in Farnham Church not by the priest but by the Mayor of Ripon.
The registers also record curiosities of national legislation that touched even small villages. The Burial in Wool Act of 1666 required all dead bodies to be buried in a shroud of pure English woollen cloth (and certified as such), to support the wool trade against imported linens. There is at least one entry in the Farnham register confirming the practice, dated 1678. The act remained on the statute book until 1814.
The tithes — the tenth part of agricultural produce historically paid to the church — originally went to Beauvale Priory; after 1539 to lay holders. They were eventually commuted into fixed rent-charges under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 and finally abolished in the twentieth century.
In 1676 the parish of Farnham was ordered to provide a Ducking Stool under penalty of twenty shillings for neglecting to do so. The Ducking Stool was a wooden chair on a long lever, used to plunge the strapped victim into water — nominally for the “testing” of witches (witchcraft remained a capital offence until 1735) and for the punishment of “scolds.” No record survives of the Stool ever being used in the village. Bridger’s 1996 study notes wryly that “since the inhabitants of Farnham have always been nice people, perhaps the Ducking Stool was never used at all.”
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Section Six
The 1841 census gives a portrait of a self-sufficient nineteenth-century community. There were six farmers and well over twenty agricultural labourers; carpenters, wheelwrights, shoemakers, blacksmiths, dressmakers and linen weavers; a schoolmaster teaching at the village’s National School, built by the Rev. Thomas Collins around 1820 and used until about 1875 (after the Education Act of 1870 it was replaced by a new school at Lingerfield; by 1897 it was recorded as “now in ruins”); lime-burners drawing stone from the local quarry; and one public house serving the community. Cattle, sheep, pigs and small fruit orchards were everywhere; the village’s surplus was traded weekly at Knaresborough Market, which has been in continuous existence since the thirteenth century.
One of the village’s odder economic ventures was the brief life of a copper mine on Folly Hill, one of the highest points in the parish. According to Hargrove’s 1800 account, the mine was opened in 1757 and “failed for want of proper management” — an indictment repeated by every subsequent writer on the subject. Folly Hill itself is now a quiet clump of trees and rocks. On a clear day the view eastward takes in the White Horse of Kilburn and the Hambleton Hills across the Vale of York.
One building on the village green has been quietly remade five times across two centuries:
The factory site on the Knaresborough road opened in the Second World War as a shell-filling munitions plant run by Greenwood & Batley. Even in 1970 the wooden walkways used to ferry workers between the individual bunkers were still visible. After the war a Mr. Robert Ingham, “a man of considerable woodworking skills,” took the site over and began making hand-built furniture; he progressed to a system of parquet flooring, and then to cabinet-making. The business eventually sold to a producer of electronic and musical equipment, and the factory now produces hi-fi cabinets that are sold worldwide. The smart new office block built in 1990 attracted favourable comment for its sympathetic design. The site was later acquired by Treves UK, whose automotive components factory now also operates from there.
Alongside the munitions factory and the cabinetmaking shop, the village kept a dairy of its own. Manor Farm Dairy, run for many years by H. Varley, bottled milk on site under the Tuberculin Tested mark — the quality standard introduced in the 1930s for milk from clean, certified herds — and ran a small green livery of delivery vans out across Farnham and the surrounding villages. The herd was driven down the village street home for milking twice a day, in a rhythm that lasted into living memory. Photographs of the vans, the bottling room, the milking parlour and the cattle on the road can be seen, in original B&W and restored to colour, in the Village Archive.
Most of the traditional trades have faded, but farming continues, including a substantial turkey farm. From the 1940s onward another transformation reshaped the immediate landscape: extensive gravel extraction (1941–1985) on the south-west edge of the parish left behind 200 acres of restored lakes — now a haven for waterbirds and home to the Ripon Sailing Club.
In 1995, Farnham was named Best Kept Village in the Lower Dales Section of the regional competition — a small accolade, but a real one, and the kind of recognition that comes only to a place where many small hands have quietly attended to its appearance and care.
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Section SevenThe first recorded publican in Farnham is John Bickerdike, who held the licence from 1597 to 1602 — one Bickerdike profitably making the village beer while another, his Catholic kinsman, was being hanged at York for his faith.
The longest-lived resident on record is John Wood, churchwarden in 1774, who died in 1787 at the age of 103. One of the church bells carries his name in its inscription — “Peake and Chapman, London · Rev. Thos. Collins Vicar · J. Wood Churchwarden 1774” — a bell rung first when he was a young man, and likely tolled at his own funeral thirteen years later.
The street name Stang Lane preserves a piece of pre-modern village justice. To “ride the stang” was a public shaming punishment for unpopular behaviour — usually marital impropriety. The offender was carried through the village on a long pole (the stang) accompanied by the rough music of pots and pans, in front of a jeering crowd. Long abandoned, it persists in the name.
On Wednesday 30 August 1797 a tanner from Ripley by the name of Peter Buck stood trial for highway robbery on Farnham Lane. The trial generated its own contemporary pamphlet (“The Trial of Peter Buck of Ripley, Tanner, for a Highway Robbery,” price threepence), now preserved in the local records. One of the witnesses, Ellen Sunderland, recalled that when she saw the accused she “was driving her cows” — a detail that does not exclude her from also being, as she certainly was within a few years, the licensee of the Crown Inn opposite the church.
The ridge running east from Gibbet Farm was marked on the 1854 Ordnance map as Gospel Balk. The name preserves a piece of medieval church practice: a “Gospel Tree” was a landmark on the parish boundary at which the vicar would pause and read a passage of the Gospel during the annual ceremony of beating the bounds. A “balk” was an unploughed strip between cultivated fields — here probably the lane leading past the Gospel Oak that marked the line. The highest point on the ridge is called Gibbet Hill for the older and grimmer custom of executing wrongdoers, then coating the body with tar, wrapping it in chains, and hanging it on a gibbet as a public warning — sometimes for weeks at a time.
For the patient reader who wants every building, every owner-and-occupier list, every cottage nickname and family-by-family detail, we have set out the whole of Richard Bridger’s 1996 walking route through the village on a dedicated page. Nine stops, west to east, from Gibbet Cottage to Stang Hall — the houses, the families, the lost school, the copper mine and the canal that never was.
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Section EightWhere direct quotations are given they have been preserved verbatim. For sources, identifications and methodology relating to the photographic archive — the three Edwardian portraits, the Crown Inn under Joseph Arthur Horner, and the Manor Farm Dairy series — see the dedicated notes on the Archive page.
The village remains a quiet, working community on the limestone ridge. Plan a walk, see the church, and step into fifteen centuries of continuous English village life.
