Potential for Further Research

The village of Wingates contains no great historic monuments, no ruins of a medieval castle or shattered fragments of a monastery, which might lend special significance to the origins of the settlement. That indeed is part of its charm and interest.

It presents us with a very typical village community, devoid of anomalous features of extraordinary significance. Thus, the basic morphological components of the medieval village settlement, which represents the original ancestor of the present village, can be charted with relative ease, its basic structure having survived remarkably well.

The two main rows of buildings and their associated toft enclosures can be traced on the ground today or on maps of the 19th century (see Section These features survive much more completely than is the case at many comparable settlements, which were transformed into ‘farm hamlets’ in the 18th or 19th centuries, i.e. settlements focussed on one or two large integrated farm complexes, with associated rows of tied cottages which might or frequently might not reflect the earlier village layout.

The agricultural exploitation of Wingates township was indeed reorganised and focused on seven substantial integrated farms – two of which were sited in the village itself – in precisely this manner during the 18th century, but this did not apparently result in the earlier layout being swept away.

Wingates evidently remained sufficiently important as a centre of trades and crafts serving the local farming economy and as a place of habitation for ‘mechanics and labourers’ (Mackenzie 1811, II, 153) to avoid substantial shrinkage and remodelling, at any rate until the First Edition Ordnance Survey had provided a definitive record or the remains of the earlier layout with its two intact rows of settlement.

Much of the explanation for the lack of major monuments at Wingates lies in the village’s relationship to neighbouring settlements which, from an early date, became the locus of functions that might otherwise have been performed at Wingates. Thus there was no parish church at Wingates, nor even a chapel-of-ease, because nearby Longhorsley was the parochial centre for the entire district. Similarly, the administration of the township’s principal manorial estate – held successively by the de Merleys, de Somervilles, ap Griffiths and Thorntons – was apparently centred on Netherwitton.

Roger de Thornton built a tower house here before 1415, probably on the site of an earlier manorial complex, the present Netherwitton Hall being built c. 1685 (Pevsner et al. 2001, 402). This obviated the need for a substantial manor house, or ‘capital messuage’, at Wingates or other major installations associated with manorial exploitation, such as a mill. (It is worth noting, however, that there might be a manorial complex of some kind at Wingates, associated with management of the smaller estate built up by the local lineage which took its name from that of the village – de Wyndegates.)

It is far more difficult to reconstruct pre-medieval patterns of settlement and landuse.

Earlier archaeological features have effectively been masked by medieval and early modern cultivation in the form of the swathes of ridge-and-furrow earthworks which cover much of the township (see Illus. 25). This activity has removed any upstanding traces of prehistoric, Romano-British or early medieval sites and makes it very difficult to identify any surviving buried remains as cropmark features. Some of ridge and furrow has in turn been levelled by more recent ploughing, but the very limited degree to which ploughing is undertaken in the area today means there is relatively little scope for using field-walking to recover evidence for prehistoric activity in the landscape.

Indeed Wingates may be said to occupy an intermediate zone where the recovery of earlier settlement patterns is peculiarly difficult. In the coastal lowlands, where arable farming is still practised on a widespread scale, there is scope to identify archaeological sites, both by the analysis of cropmarks revealed by aerial photography and also by the use of fieldwalking. These techniques can then be followed up by geophysical survey and excavation. In the more upland districts, on the other hand, where agricultural cultivation has been pursued far less intensively many sites survive as upstanding monuments. A degree of serendipity may therefore be required if our understanding of the prehistoric and Romano-British past in the area around of Wingates is to progress further.

Potential for Future Research

The following represents a list of potential avenues of research which could be explored further, by the village community as a whole or by interested individuals:

1. Further study of the Trevelyan Papers held at Netherwitton Hall could yield worthwhile results. The tenurial history of Wingates was intimately linked with that of Neterwitton. These papers relate not only to the Trevelyan possession of Netherwitton, but also the preceding Thornton period, stretching back into the late medieval era. Hodgson made use of these documents in recounting the history of Netherwitton and the descent of the Thornton and Trevelyan families, in Part II, Volume 1 of his History of Northumberland (Hodgson 1827). However more detailed analysis might yield more information regarding the history of Wingates in the late medieval and early modern periods. In particular, it might shed light on the process whereby the township, which had a number of manorial lords in the late 14th century, had become encompassed within a single estate by the mid 18th century when the Trevelyans and the Witham families jointly acquired it through marriage to the Thornton heiresses.

2. Pele Cottage would merit further study by a historic buildings specialist. It appears to be the oldest surviving building in the village, the thickness of its walls and its name suggesting that it may have originated as a defensible ‘pele house’. Now more commonly labelled bastles, such pele houses represent the type of two-storey defensible farmhouse built in considerable numbers right across the border counties in the late 16th or early 17th centuries.

3. A programme of small-scale excavation could be used to investigate features of especial interest in the village and the wider township. Targets might include sections across the toft boundaries associated with the village rows (particularly the area south row next to the village hall where a considerable length is no longer built up).

4. The most promising candidate for excavation is perhaps the site of WingatesSpa, located in the narrow dell carved by the Chirm Linn stream. Although relatively short-lived, the spa is a distinctive and important feature in the history of the village and occupies a prominent place in local perceptions of Wingates’ past.

5. Todburn: The documentary record and known archaeological remains relating to the neighbouring settlement of Todburn raise some very intriguing questions and merit further investigation (see Section 6.4.2). It first appears as a distinct township in the early 15th century. The relevant Inquisitions Post Mortem record six building plots (messuages) and a water mill there, but only a relatively small quantity of arable land (20-30 acres). The archaeological remains of a medieval bloomery (iron-working site) have been identified in the valley bottom there and one possible explanation for the appearance of Todburn settlement is that it was associated with establishment of a late medieval industrial complex, perhaps using water power provided by the Tod Burn (to work bellows for instance).

The site would clearly merit more intensive study including excavation to test this hypothesis. It should be noted that there is also a good corpus of mid- to late 18th-century maps covering Todburn which may assist any such field investigation.

6. Garretlee and Holme: Garretlee is a medieval settlement in origin (Gerardesley, i.e. ‘Gerard’s lee’ or ‘clearing’) like Wingates village. Now simply comprising two farmsteads, the layout of the medieval settlement is much less apparent than is the case with Wingates itself. Some tentative suggestions have been made in Section 6.4.2, but any available opportunity to test these hypotheses through excavation or watching brief should be seized. The Holme is the oldest of the isolated farmsteads distributed around the wider township, being established by c. 1600, in contrast to Wingates Moor and the Chirm which are 18th-century in origin. It is therefore of some significance. The date and circumstances of its foundation are unclear and, again, any opportunity to record further information through excavation should be taken.

7. The history of the rural industries and crafts known to have existed at Wingates, such as Chirm Pit and other coal workings, the tileworks, the limekiln, and quarries (all in the north-west quarter of the township), plus the smithy and the present saw mill in the village itself, could be the subject of further investigation through documentary and archaeological research and oral recording.

8. The history of education at Wingates represents a particularly promising theme for further archival research. Some of the possible avenues whereby this could be pursued are outlined below.

Education in Wingates

Although there is a healthy quantity of material from which a history of Wingates’ school may be compiled, there is room for research to locate more. In particular the following should be considered:

• Collecting any copies of pupils’ work for all periods from the nineteenth century to the present day;
• Collecting any copies of relevant school photographs (including sports teams, pictures of the buildings etc.) from the earliest locatable to the present day;
• Continuing to extend the collection of oral history interviews not only by expanding those for the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s but by bringing them more up-to-date, especially considering the proposed changes to the local government and educational structure of the county;
• Undertaking research in the National Archives at Kew to supplement the material available from local sources;
• Compiling a master file of all the collected material that may be used for use in writing a history of education in the village or as a village based archive to be used by children for local studies.