Township (England) - History

History

In many areas of England, the basic unit of civil administration was the parish, generally identical with the ecclesiastical parish. However in some cases, particularly in northern England, there was a lesser unit called a township, being a subdivision of a parish. This could happen for several reasons:

• In some parts of northern England, the parishes were too large to be managed conveniently. For example, Sheffield constituted a single parish, which had six townships in it — Ecclesall Bierlow, Brightside Bierlow, Attercliffe cum Darnall, Nether Hallam, Upper Hallam, and Sheffield itself. Whalley parish, in Lancashire, contained 47 townships and extended over 43,000 ha (105,000 ac).
• There or elsewhere, occasionally, different parts of a parish were in different hundreds or counties.
• Sometimes, one township included parts of several different parishes, as in Heworth near York, which included parts of the parishes of St Saviour, St Cuthbert and St Giles.

The local historian Dorothy Silvester has identified a "parish line", which divided northern from southern counties of England and Wales (Denbighshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, and northern Yorkshire). North of this line, parishes tended on the whole to be large, containing several townships. However, south of this line, parishes tended to contain single townships.

A township appointed overseers of the poor and surveyors of highways in the same way as a parish and they financed their obligations by levying a rate, in the same way as parish officials. The original definition of a Civil Parish was any place in respect of which a rate could lawfully be levied. Most townships disappeared before 1866 either being included into adjacent civil parishes or gaining their own separate civil parish status.