Parishes, Townships and Wards

In the usual manner of county histories, John Hodgson's History of Northumberland discusses the history of Redesdale primarily within the framework of ecclesiastical parishes and their constituent townships, an example which was later followed by all 15 volumes produced by the Northumberland County History Committee.

A township is conventionally defined as the territorial resource of a particular rural community. Their boundaries became fixed when the land appropriated to that community extended, as a result of colonisation, up to land belonging to neighbouring settlements. The term used to designate a township in medieval documents was vill (villa in Latin). Rochester probably formed a township following its establishment in the late medieval/early modern era.

This township would only have embraced the settlement and its surrounding fields meadows and moorland. Its scale may be gauged by the size of the community of customary tenants listed under the heading of Rochester in the 1604 Border Survey and the 1618 Rental (1604 Survey; 1618 Rental, 337), whilst its territorial extent can still be traced as a subunit within the larger ward or township of Rochester on tithe, enclosure and estate maps of the 18th and 19th centuries. It covers both High and Low Rochester (initially Nether Rochester) and the surrounding farmsteads of Hillock (Over Rochester), Dykehead and Petty Knowes, and is bounded by the Rede to the south and the Sills Burn to the west.