CROMWELL, CLOCKBURN LONNEN & CROWLEY
By Dennis Shaw
1650 Clockburn Lonnen Although it is difficult to imagine now, Clockburn Lonnen was once the main highway from the north to Durham. It crossed the River Tyne at Newburn then passed to Winlaton via Blaydon Burn and from there to old Winlaton Mill, crossing the Derwent and following Clockburn Lonnen to Durham. Cromwell's army of 16,000 men passed this way on the 15th July 1650 on their way to the Battle of Dunbar.
1650 Jul 15th Winlaton Mill late in the afternoon a little group of people who lived round the form over the Derwent at Winlaton Mill were dumbfounded. Here they saw, rumbling down the hillside from the East, a mass of men and horses. Sturdy, weather-beaten, brown faced men they were, mostly shot, used to living rough with little or no overnight shelter and on a Spartan diet. They marched not in boots but in heavy shoes with knee-length stockings pulled over their breeches. Some led horses which hauled heavy artillery pieces, others leaned back on ropes to keep the guns under some control as they trundled jingling, rattling, bumping down to the river.
This was the artillery and baggage train of Cromwell’s New Model Army on its way to the battle of Dunbar, July 1650. The ‘artillerie’ – often civilians pressed for the job put under the command of a mercenary master gunner and his assistant ‘matrosses’ – walked beside them. With them down to the stream came the powdermen, the shotboys, the rammers, the runners and the porte feus – the men who fired the guns from slow march at the end of a long pole.
The porte feus probably did not hear the tinkling music of the Derwent as it swirled over the stones at the lonnen ford. They never had any protection from the cannons’ roar and their eardrums suffered. They were generally at least partly deaf and probably denied hearing the birdsong of the countryside. Fresh home in England from fighting in Ireland, Cromwell was now on his way North to settle business with the Scots, having left London late in June.
At Durham he met up with his Colonels Hacker and Pride and had pressed on to Newcastle by July 10 to pause for breath and a feast. There he inspected 16 regiments of horse and foot – about 16,000 men – but thought it imprudent to seize horseshoes, nails and beds in the city as it ‘might cause too much confusion’. He did face a problem in Newcastle, however. Many of his army were now sick men, a situation which worsened until they had to be taken off the Scottish coast at Mussleburgh and shipped back home to England. But above all, there was a problem of the bridge at Newcastle; the heavy baggage and artillery trains were far too heavy to be risked on it. Woods So not, as many have thought, to intimidate the populace but to avoid disaster, the army was split. The heavier trains were diverted to cross by the ford on the old drovers’ road between Scotland and Durham and then South, over the Derwent where men and beasts had trod since Saxon days.
We know it now as the Clockburn Lonnen just below the Golden Lion pub on the Derwent Valley route to Rowlands Gill. The lower portion of the road from the West bank took the baggage and artillery through thick oak birch and holly woods. It’s still there. The upper reaches are now partly lost in a straightened road which leads up to Winlaton town, and to the Saxon Way the New Model Army took over the hilltop to drop down to form the Tyne at Newburn. Thence they marched on to re-join the rest of the regiments already in Northumberland. Today, spring and summer have together arched a green canopy over the rough track Cromwell’s men trod but the higher lines of it can still be traced, by the meandering remains of one of its hedges. In Cromwell’s day Newburn was the first fordable point in the Tyne above Newcastle. The Newcastle bridge later washed away in the 1771 floods was narrow and congested, too difficult for cattle and vehicles, which instead used the Clockburn ford and the Clockburn highway when bound for North or South. Thins had not gone easily for the Parliamentarians. Newcastle was a Royalist centre and already Cromwell had left troops in England to secure against Cavalier risings. One regiment of foot was already posted in Newcastle against that very threat.
In the North there had been atrocious weather even in July and it was getting worse. Cromwell’s Scoutmaster, General William Bowe, had looked to the British Navy – the Scots’ fleet being of little hindrance – to secure stores and food by sea. But the men who crossed the Derwent all those years ago had been living on hard-baked long-life bread supplemented by cheese. Bowe’s main but uninspiring Army diet of the day. Bowe’s baggage train had included his ‘bisquit ovens’ for making more of that hard bread on the march. Thinking now of their rumbling bellies, the troops had been promised beans and oats, apples and pears from Kent, to be landed by the Navy in the Tyne, at Berwick and further North. The men who seated and grunted their way up leafy Mill Lane goading their baggage and gun teams, had not even had the benefit of tentage by night, though Crowell had his (“for His Excellency’s person use”) and for which he had paid £46. The ordinary soldier had little to sing about. Yet he did sing on the march and he was not always chanting his Puritan Psalms, either. The rankers had their own ‘Marching Music’ of sometimes quite bawdy songs not, presumably, sung in the immediate hearing of either their officers or the army lay preachers like John Owen, who marched with them to give them regular sermons. Many in the Ironsides army were never to fight at Dunbar, anyway.
Sickness took them off even before the two factions met, seasoned and hardy men though they were, pledged to live and die with Cromwell for about eightpence a day (less deductions for food, clothing and accommodation) in the infantry and two shillings in the cavalry (Out of which they had to provide their own horses). The field guns crossing the Clockburn accounted for a considerable proportion of the army’s horses to haul them and the baggage trains – nearly 1,000 in fact. The guns ranged from the demi-culverins which threw a ball of between nine and 12 pounds, down through the sakers to the little threepounder drakes. All rumbled and splashed their way over, then ground up the other side past a little group of humble homes which stood there as they had for at least 400 years before, because the mill was founded by wandering Saxons in the first place.
What of the men who passed this way? Lord General of the Army (the title he chose himself) Cromwell wrote to the Governor of Newcastle that they were suffering from ‘sickness beyond imagination’. But they had yet to face more hardships and yet more hunger.
Those who survived to actually fight at Dunbar got the Dunbar Medal, the first to be struck for all ranks in the British Army. There was not to be another like it until the Battle of Waterloo, more than 150 years later. Yet in all the troubles and hardship of the march, it seems the niceties were not altogether forgotten. For, two days after his men had crossed the Derwent, Cromwell signed letters of protection for Lady Anne Thornton, a Royalist who had been the involuntary host to his troops in her grounds at Netherwitton. He forbade all officers and others under his command to ‘prejudice’ the lady or her family by taking any of her horses, cattle or any other goods whatsoever, without special order. And a few days later he paid her £94 for the corn and grass his army had used on her estate, Royalist and ‘enemy’ though she was. It might be worthwhile visiting the Clockburn Ford on the Derwent Walk to wander up through wooded Winlaton Mill Lane, to stand and listen there awhile. You might hear, even now, the echoes down over the years of a mighty Puritan Army of men and horses on their way to battle, singing their Psalms, even their rollicking Marching Music, sweating under their packs and (God forbid) swearing.
1651 Cromwell stayed at Stella Hall. On July 15th, the main army of Cromwell was at Newcastle. For two days the army had rested at Whickham. The cannon and heavy baggage had been sent round by Clockburn Lane, and after fording the Derwent at Winlaton Mill, and advancing by the Birk Gate to Winlaton and Stella, crossed the Tyne at the bend of the river at the east end of Stella Haughs, and met the Protector with his main army on the north side of the Tyne. The ford by which part of the army crossed the river is still called "the Cromwell." On July 22nd, Cromwell crossed the Tweed, and on September 3rd he met the veteran Leslie at Dunbar, where the Scotch were defeated, 4,000 being killed, and above 10,000 taken prisoners. When Oliver Cromwell stayed at Stella Hall. Cromwell was a Republican with an almost pathalogical hatred of Catholicism; and of the Tempests, Royalists and Catholics both. It is possible that Cromwell was unaware of the true nature of his hosts; it is quite possible simultaneously a priest was hiding on the premises. The Tempests must have wondered whether Cromwell was playing a cat & mouse game with them. Nicholas Tempest's Great Granddaughter, Lady Jane Widdrington, played a noteable part in the foundation of the parish. Her husband, Lord Widdrington, was tried for high treason after taking part with Lord Derwentwater in Jacobite plotting in 1715. He was reprieved and eventually died in 1745.
1660 Charles II became King of England.
1660 Fireclay was worked at Blaydon Burn, and manufactured into bricks at Paridise, on the north side of the
Tyne.
1660 Nobby’s End a man hanged himself after finding out that Charles 2nd was to come to the thrown. He was buried with a stake through his heart at four lane ends.
One of the most famous old Winlaton tales is that of an ‘unknown gentleman’ who was found hanging from a tree in Lands Wood in 1660. It was supposed that this man, later named as Selby, was a prominent Parliamentarian who had hanged himself on hearing of the Restoration of Charles II. Suicide was illegal, and suicides could not be buried in consecrated ground. Instead, the man’s body was taken to a crossroads in Winlaton, at Knobby Ends Lane, and buried at midnight. A stake was driven through his heart in the belief that this would prevent his ghost from walking (a vampiric touch pre-dating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by a couple of centuries). ‘Selby’s grave’ became a local landmark, and for hundreds of years passers-by would throw three stones at the cairn that marked the grave – a superstition supposedly designed to help a spirit pass to the afterlife.
1664 Sir Nicolas Tempest, 6th Baronet (1664–1742). He inherited the title but not the estates of Stella which passed to Jane Tempest, sister of the above and wife of William Widdrington, 4th Baron Widdrington attainted for his part in the 1715 Jacobite rising. He married Ann Price. He is interred at Tanfield, Durham.
1674 Chopwell Bishop Hugh gave Chopwell to Newminster Abbey in exchange for Wolsingham. The following charter was produced in a tythe cause betwixt the estate of Chopwell and the Rector of Ryton, in 1674 :I can only conjecture that on the dissolution the Swinburns, who were already tenants of Chopwell under the Abbey, obtained mediately or immediately the fee simple from the crown or its grantees. In 1545 John Swinburn (fn. 95) (a bastard of the house of Edlingham) devises his farm (fn. 96) of Chopwell to his second son John Swinburn. In 1553 the younger John executes a settlement of the manor (fn. 97) ; the fee was therefore acquired betwixt the two dates. In 1562 John Swinburne, Esq. was litigating his boundaries betwixt the manors of Ryton and Chopwell, with Pilkington, Bishop of Durham (fn. 98) . In 1569 he was deeply engaged in the great Northern rebellion, fled under attainder to Farniherst in Scotland, escaped from thence into Flanders, was afterwards a pensioner at Madrid, and probably died in exile (fn. 99) . The manor of Chopwell, thus vested in the Crown, was granted by the Queen (fn. 100) to Sir Robert Constable of Flamborough, in recompence of his most base service as a spy and informer (fn. 101) . Sir William Constable, son and heir of Sir Robert, sold the manor of Chopwell to Anthony Aucher (fn. 102) , and he immediately conveyed to Ambrose Dudley, Alderman of Newcastle, whose son and heir, Toby Dudley, Esq. left an only daughter Jane Dudley, wife of Robert Clavering (fn. 103) , a younger brother of the first Sir James Clavering, of Axwell. The male issue of Clavering failed in his grandchildren, and Sarah, the sister and eventual heir of John and Dudley Clavering, became the wife of the Lord Chancellor, William Earl Cowper
1676 Sir William Blackett "cut into a hill in order to drain the water, and conqueredall difficultiesof such
and the like until he came to clay,and that was too hard for him ;for no means of timber and walls would resist, and allwas crowded together; and this was by the weightof the hill bearing upon clay that yielded.In this work he lost £20,000." It is a pitythe Lord Keeper does not mention the name of the hill; but in all probabilitity was Winlaton. At the time of Sir William Blackett's death,in 1680, he held the manor of Winlaton and the coal mines
there.
1680 Sir William Blackett's death, in 1680, he held the manor of Winlaton and the coal mines there.
1682 Blaydon Burn, Belts Corn Mill. A survey of the Lordship of Winlaton made in 1682, when it was divided between three proprietors, is said to show six water mills along the burn from Brockwell Wood to the River Tyne, three of them close together where the brickworks are now. One of these could probably be on the site of the exisiting building. The tithe map of Winlaton, 1838, shows five corn mills, but not the one to the west of the existing one. Five mills are still shown on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map map c.1855, but on the second edition 1898, only one, Path Head Mill is shown as a corn mill. Two have gone and two are no longer named as mills. The existing building is one of the latter. This former water corn mill is the last survivor of the former five or six, representing what must have been from at least the early C17, a busy corn milling area. No documentary evidence is known of at present from which the existing building could be dated. The earliest references found are of the early C19. It is a good example of a long tradition of small modest industrial buildings whose appearance changed little during the 18th century and early C19. Three advertisements appeared in the Newcastle papers during the second half of the 18th century for the letting of water corn mills on the Blaydon Burn. Two of these stated that the mills were newly or lately built, suggesting either re-building or an extension of an older mill. During the first half of the 19th century until circa 1858, the mill was worked by Belt & Co. (Belt & Patterson in the 1820s and later Belt & Whitfield). Belt & Whitfield are given as "Grocers, drapers and corn millers" in Whellan's Durham of 1856. A plan of 1823 shows the mill with its dam and leat and named "Belt & Co. Mill". The mill was held from Peregrine Towneley in the 1820s and land tax of some 10s was paid. The last directory entry for Belt & Whitfield is that of 1858, followed by a last entry for Whitfield alone, as "miller" in c.1864. From 1868 Ewart is given as "grocer in Winlaton and miller at Blaydon Burn". He may have been the successor to Belt & Whitfield. 1886 is the last entry for him as miller, although 1890 is the last entry as grocer under Mrs. Mary Ewart. Bourne in his History of Ryton, 1896 says: "On the south of the brickworks stands Messrs. Belt and Whitfield's disused corn mill. The water wheel still rests on the east side of the building"