Looking back at my research over the years one of the names that stands out is Bracewell but in almost every instance it is the family name I am looking at. I've looked at Bracewell village in passing but never really had a go at it. Time you lot got a fair crack of the whip! Let's see what we can weave together.
A good place to start is the name. As far as I know it is the only village with this name in England and that in itself is handy because it means that anyone with the surname Bracewell or one of the many variants of it can be certain that their roots go back to our Bracewell. My trusted advisers, Eilert Ekwall and the English Place Names Society both agree that the root of the name is almost certainly Breio's Well. This is an Old Norse name and one wonders how this Dane or Viking managed to end up settling here. This makes it a very ancient name, older than Barnoldswick and quite possibly dating back to the 5th century. The name of the associated lost village of Stock derives almost certainly from the Old English 'Stoc' and is generally taken to mean 'an outlying holding', in this case of the settlement at Bracewell. So we can start by imagining Breio settling in a place where there was fertile land and a good well and gradually increasing the size of the holding to include more land. The fields to the north of his main residence became known as Stock, the outlier. There is another name in this category at Bracewell, Aynams. This derives from 'af-nams' meaning a detached portion of an estate. Again, almost certainly referring to Bracewell.
Breio would have built a timber hall and because of the lie of the land this was most likely on the site where the next Bracewell Hall was built, the brick building inhabited by the Tempests until the 17th century. As far as I can find out, Roger de Tempest came over with the Conqueror and was granted the manors of Bracewell and Stock shortly after Domesday (1086/87) and certainly by early in the reign of Henry I (1100-1135). Sometime between then and the 16th century the hall was rebuilt, possibly around 1143, the date of the chantry chapel. From the picture we have of the ruins of this hall in the mid 19th century we can see it had grown into an imposing three storey brick pile, an important house as befitted the family that owned it and reputedly the largest brick building in Craven. The Tempests were the Lords of Bracewell and had other land holdings as well. One of the fields near the hall is named Kiln Hill and this could well be where the bricks for the hall were fired. I have found Tudor bricks in an old wall near the watermill down the valley and they are very rare in this neck of the woods.
The only remaining portion of the old hall is what is known as King Henry's Parlour which has a 14th century window. In Whitaker's History of Craven he believes that this is part of the original 12th century hall and suggests that King Henry VI stayed there. In 1654 Richard Tempest was in financial difficulties. He fled to France and in 1656 gave orders for the hall to be demolished, by 1657 he was in the Fleet debtors prison and died there. On his death the estate went to John Rushworth his cousin who in turn left it to his daughter Mrs South. There was some legal dispute about the way the estate had been transferred and in 1705 she and Richard Tempest of Broughton Hall came to some arrangement. They sold the estate to Thomas Weddell in 1717.
The Tempests left what was to prove a useful legacy for Barlick. If you remember, the Cistercian monks demolished the existing church at Barlick in about 1150. A church had been built at Bracewell in 1143 to serve as a chantry chapel for the Bracewells and in 1153 the bishop designated St Michael's as the parish church for Barlick and Bracewell. Remember that church attendance was compulsory at this time and so the Barlickers had a long weary walk every Sunday down to Bracewell. In 1157 this was alleviated by the building of the church at Gill, not quite as far to walk!
We have no evidence but I suspect there was a Saxon church at Bracewell before 1143. Barlick certainly had one and as Bracewell at that time was more important than Barlick there's a good chance that they built a simple church possibly around 600 when the re-conversion of England under Augustine was in progress. The church was given to Kirkstall Abbey by Richard Tempest in about 1190 but at the mid 16th century Dissolution of the Abbeys the family bought the advowson, the power to appoint clergy, from the Crown. There was one bell in the tower of the church which carried the names of the churchwardens and the date 1718, possibly the gift of Weddell on his accession to the estate.
The business of the Bracewell Estate was farming, they had their own manorial watermill on the Stock Beck in the fields behind Yarlside and an extensive strip farming system on the gentle hills surrounding Stock. We know that this ancient method of land allocation to tenants was still in place in 1717 because when Thomas Weddell Esquire bought the estate he had a map made which gives the names of the tenants and their holdings. We haven't space to go too deeply into these but the names of the different strips and crofts is fascinating and in many cases, like 'Pease Croft', tells us what was growing there. If you want to dig further into that there is a copy of the map in Barlick library. From the evidence we have, it looks as though some part of the brick built hall and certainly the building known as King Henry's parlour to the north of the main building were still habitable. I think this is where Thomas Weddell lived when he was in residence.
Right! I shall leave you contemplating Bracewell in 1717 until next week. Plenty more to tell!
A photograph of the ruins of Bracewell Hall reputedly made by Billycock Bracewell in about 1851.
