Book Review by Steve Matthews of Bookends.
Kirkoswald and Renwick by Richard Brockington and Sarah Rose. Victoria County History. £12.
Today, less than 900 people live in Kirkoswald and Renwick. Four hundred years ago, when the two villages were separate parishes, the population was a little over half that number. In the late Middle Ages there were probably between five hundred and six hundred people living in the area. However, the 1831 census records a population of 1408 inhabitants.
They were ancient parishes. The names, Kirkoswald, that is Oswald’s Church, and Renwick, or Ravenswick, indicate that there were Norse settlements in the area centuries before the Normans came.
And people had been occupying these lands from a far earlier date. A late Bronze Age burial mound was found at Old Parks Farm in 1895.
Kirkoswald was granted the right to hold a weekly market and an annual fair in 1201. In the same year the Lord of the Manor received a licence to fortify the castle and empark the surrounding land.
“By the mid 16th century, the village of Kirkoswald lay huddled at the foot of the hill close to the church and the castle, and possessed a single corn mill. Hemmed in by the castle demesne, the College, and the extensive glebe land of the church on the south side of the Raven Beck, the village expanded northward, up the hill to Townhead.”
From the fourteenth century, much of the parish of Kirkoswald was owned by the Dacre family. They enlarged the castle and founded the College. In 1716, the land was sold to the Musgraves and, two centuries later, in 1913 it was bought by the Leys family.
The ownership of the Manor of Renwick has been in the hands of Queens College, Oxford, sinse 1341.
These were agricultural villages drawing their existence from the farming in the surrounding area. In the nineteenth century, there were corn mills, fulling mills, a woollen mill, paper mills and saw mills in the village. William Holliday established a brewery at Ravenghyll in 1833. He went out of business in 1841, but the brewing was continued by John Walton, the publican of the George and Dragon and later by William Hodgson of the Crown Hotel.
In 1901, the inhabitants were “chiefly engaged in agriculture, although a few find employment in a small woollen factory and a carding mill.”
The story of Kirkoswald and Renwick is like the story of many Cumbrian villages. But it is also individual and distinctive.
Richard Brockington’s book, produced under the auspices of Lancaster University is the first in an ambitious project to complete the Victoria County History of the county, which was begun over a hundred years ago. Its aim is to provide a full and scholarly history of all the towns and villages in the county.