A HISTORY OF ECCLESFIELD PARISH - Page 2

Compiled by Joan & Mel Jones of Chapeltown & High Green Archive

The area now covered by the modern parish has relied since time immemorial on the exploitation of the physical resources within its boundaries: the land, the woods, the stone, the coal, the iron and the power generated from its small streams and brooks. These gave rise at an early date not only to farming, quarrying, coal and ironstone mining and woodland crafts but also to a tradition of iron production, light metal trades, and later to foundry work, engineering and coke and chemicals production. Eventually it was coal mining, foundry products, engineering and chemicals production, together with the inexorable growth of Sheffield and the suburbanisation of its population, that transformed the landscape of the area and made the once separate villages and hamlets into the interlocking, cosmopolitan residential communities of today.

The name of the parish and of the ancient village within it, Ecclesfield, is of Anglo-Saxon origin and means the Christian church (eccles from the Celtic word eglwys) sitting in a treeless area (feld) in a district otherwise well-wooded. It is generally believed that Ecclesfield was the ecclesiastical centre for a large Celtic estate when the heathen Anglo-Saxons settled the area, an estate covering much of modern Sheffield and known by the Middle Ages as Hallamshire.

Before suburbanisation, Ecclesfield was a stone-built village, the original centre of which – called the Town End or Top End – huddled below the Parish Church (known in the past as the Minster of the Moors) and Priory, along Church Street, St Mary’s Lane, Townend Road and Stocks Hill. Here were a number of inns and taverns and the village stocks, and it was probably here that the bull and bear baiting took place that the Revd Alfred Gatty, the new vicar in 1839, referred to as having survived within living memory. The village stretched beyond this core along the present High Street (formerly called the Wallet) where there was a small green, and along Dog Leg Lane (now Mill Lane) to the Common. Behind the village to the west of the church is a small stream that flows eastwards and eventually joins Blackburn Brook on the Common. This small insignificant brook powered up to six water-powered mills producing at one time or another flour, paper, cotton, scythes and forks. Beyond the village lay an open field system, and although the open strips were to continue in existence until the late nineteenth century, local farmers were cultivating their strips privately for at least a century and a half before that time. Villagers not only cultivated the land and kept livestock but also often had a second occupation. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the most important of these was nailmaking, which was replaced by hand file-cutting in the nineteenth century, which in turn disappeared in the face of competition from machine-made files. Nailmaking was a domestic industry carried on in a nail-making smithy, which was often converted into a file-making workshop. A small number of these still survive in the village.

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