Huyton

The Anglo-Saxon lands of the Dods, now a suburb of Liverpool

The Bakers Home Page Return to the Home Page of the Bakers Family part of the website

The Bakers of Highfields Story The Story of the Dods and Bakers and of Highfields, Fenton House and Hasfield Court. A journey through the history of Cheshire and Staffordshire, an Anglo-Saxon nobleman who retained his lands after the Conquest, pottery at Stoke on Trent, an encounter with Elgar, and the history of an Elizabethan manor house at Audlem

The Bakers of Highfields The family tree of the Bakers of Highfields

The Dod Family The Family Tree of the Dods, predecessors to the Bakers of Highfields

The Bakers of Fenton House and Hasfield Court The Family Tree of the pottery Bakers of Stoke on Trent

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The Farndale Story The main part of this website tells the story of the Farndale family from Yorkshire Descendants of Arthur Baker, the story of the Farndale ancestry is told through the main part of this website You can also return to the Farndale website home page

The Hall Family The genealogy of the family of James Hall, linked to the Baker family through marriage to Arthur Baker

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For a detailed chronology of the wider Mercian Kingdom, see Anglo Saxon Cheshire.

Huyton is now an eastern urban suburb of Liverpool.

Anglo Saxon Huyton

During the Anglo-Saxon period, the area of modern Liverpool was a sparsely populated, rural, and heavily wooded landscape entirely disconnected from its later identity as a major maritime port. No settlement at modern Liverpool existed. It was not chartered until 1207. The region was a peripheral frontier zone integrated into the Kingdom of Mercia, and occasionally contested by Northumbria, with the River Mersey acting as a natural political boundary.

The site of modern Liverpool was a natural, marshy creek or tidal inlet branching off from the River Mersey. It provided a sheltered harbour but was surrounded by low-lying, swampy bogs, mosslands, and tidal mudflats. Rising above the marshes were prominent red sandstone ridges, which provided elevated, dry ground suitable for small-scale structures and lookout points.

Inland the landscape was agrarian and wild, dominated by dense woodland and open meadows. Etymological clues from surviving Anglo-Saxon place names offer some idea of the local environment. Places like Speke derived from the Old English for "brushwood" or "woodpecker," while Fazakerley referred to a "clearing in the woodland". The area supported significant wildlife populations. The name West Derby translates from Old English and Old Norse as the "place of wild beasts" or "West Deer Park," suggesting a wild, forested terrain later used for tracking game. Pockets of marshy grasslands were used for livestock. Garston stems from gaerstun, meaning a "meadow or grazing farm", and Everton translates to a "farmstead of the wild boar". The settlement of Walton (Wealas-tun, meaning "farmstead of the Britons") suggests that native, Romanised Celtic Britons continued to live in their own pockets of farmland under Anglo-Saxon rule. Walton may have also derived from weald (wood).

400 CE

Following the withdrawal of the Romans, small rural farming communities farmed the land before the region fell under the control of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Mercia. The local population lived in small, self-sufficient agricultural hamlets and farmsteads, cultivating the land and fishing in the river. Initially the Romano Britains with possessions to lose, fled westwards, but over the following centuries the Germanic incomers followed them, and the indigenous Britains took refuse in the mountainous regions of Wales.

600 CE

Over the sixth and seventh centuries, Germanic invaders began expanding westward. Huyton was first settled by Anglo-Saxons around 600 to 650 CE on a low hill surrounded by marshland, reflected in its Old English name meaning High Town. The Anglian folk who founded the site probably used a nearby landing place on the River Alt.

616 CE

Because Huton sat at a crossroads, the area became heavily contested between the northern kingdom of Northumbria and the emerging kingdom of Mercia. Initially, the region fell under northern influence. The word Mersey translates from Old English to Boundary River. For long stretches of history, it served as a clearly defined boundary, Northumbria ruled the north bank, and Mercia ruled the south (the Wirral).

In around 616 CE, King Æthelfrith of Northumbria won a decisive victory at the Battle of Chester.

633 CE

Although Northumbrian dominance continued until the Viking attack on Lindisfarne in 793 CE, the fortunes of the competing kingdoms ebbed and flowed. The Northumbrian Edwin was killed at Hæthfelth, the Battle of Hatfield Chase, near Doncaster, along with his son Osfrith, on 12 October 633 CE by the combined Mercian and Welsh forces under Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd and Penda of Mercia. Mercia was coalescing in the early seventh century into a powerful kingdom in the midlands.

642 CE

Mercia’s rise to dominance in the mid-to-late seventh century under powerful pagan kings like Penda reshaped the political landscape. Mercia relentlessly pushed its frontiers north and west. Eventually, Mercian kings successfully pushed across the River Mersey, claiming the strategic territory between the River Mersey and the River Ribble. This definitive shift brought Huyton, Walton, and the rest of the modern Liverpool area firmly into the Mercian realm, converting it into an administrative frontier zone. Nevertheless, the land between the Mersey and the Ribble rivers remained a disorganised border region under Mercian control from the mid seventh century century.

758 CE

By the mid eighth century Mercia was growing in ascendancy. There was an evolving English identity.

Between 758 to 770 CE, Offa consolidated his control over Midland tribal groups such as the Hwicce and Magonsæte, and exerted early influence over Sussex and Kent.

Scandinavian Huyton

877 CE

Scandinavians began to settle lands in Mercia permanently.

The area around Huyton was settled by Scandinavians in the tenth century. By the time the Vikings arrived in the ninth and tenth centuries, the foundations of the area as a Mercian borderland were firmly established, later solidifying into the historic county boundaries of Lancashire.

893 CE

In 893 Vikings raided Chester, then 'a deserted city in Wirral'. (Early medieval Chester 400-1230, in A History of the County of Chester: Volume 5 Part 1, the City of Chester: General History and Topography, ed. C P Lewis, A T Thacker (London, 2003), British History Online, pages 16 to 33).

902 CE

A Hiberno-Norse settlement on the Wirral peninsula was established in 902 CE and extended across the Mersey into the area of modern Liverpool. Driven out of Dublin, a group of Norwegian-descended Vikings led by a commander named Ingimund negotiated a peaceful land grant from Æthelflæd, the Queen of the Mercians and daughter of Alfred the Great.

The territory granted to Ingimund occupied the northern half of the Wirral peninsula. Over the following decades, a massive influx of settlers from Ireland, the Isle of Man, and Scotland transformed this enclave into a highly organized, practically independent mini-Viking state.

The settlement established its own system of governance at Thingwall (derived from the Old Norse Þingvöllr, meaning "Assembly Field"), which served as a central Scandinavian parliament. The coastal settlement of Meols became a thriving international seaport and trading hub, acting as the primary gateway for goods moving across the Irish Sea. Excavations have uncovered Hiberno-Norse pins, brooches, weapons, and the remains of characteristic oval-shaped Viking longhouses at Irby. The landscape adopted many Old Norse names. Settlements ending in -by (meaning farmstead or village) like Irby ("settlement of the Irish Vikings"), Frankby, Greasby, and West Kirby map out the dense concentration of Norse families.

The coastal settlement of Meols was located on the northernmost coast of the Wirral Peninsula, fronting the Irish Sea. Today, it survives as a residential suburb situated directly between Hoylake (to the west) and Moreton (to the east). The settlement of Irby is located in the central-western region of the Wirral Peninsula, roughly two miles inland from the Dee Estuary.

Genetic studies led by the University of Nottingham found that up to 50% of the DNA in local men from long-standing Wirral and West Lancashire families carries distinct Norwegian ancestry, proving that this early tenth-century migration left a permanent genetic and cultural blueprint on both sides of the Mersey.

907 CE

Æthelflæd, the Lady of the Mercians, fortified the strategic frontier town of Chester, extending English Mercia's control northward and establishing a base against Northumbrian Danes.

The history of medieval Chester can be said to begin only in 907 with the refortification of the site by the ruler of Mercia, King Alfred's daughter Æthelflæd (Two Saxon Chrons. i. 94) The background to that event was the establishment of a Hiberno-Norse community in Wirral after its expulsion from Dublin in 902. It seems that the exiles, led by Hingamund, were granted land in Wirral by Æthelflæd and her husband Æthelred but soon afterwards cast covetous eyes on the wealth of Chester, only to be repulsed by the great army which she assembled in the city. The story, although preserved only in a late source, has been shown to be reliable in essentials, and confirms that any desertion of the city was temporary. (Early medieval Chester 400-1230, in A History of the County of Chester: Volume 5 Part 1, the City of Chester: General History and Topography, ed. C P Lewis, A T Thacker (London, 2003), British History Online, pages 16 to 33).

1066

Recorded as Hitune in the Domesday Book in 1086, the name combines Old English elements meaning high (heah) and enclosure or settlement (tun). Immediately before the Norman transition, the settlement was held by a local lord named Dot, who owned both Huyton and the manor of Torboc (Tarbock). These manor lands were a portion of the area between the Ribble and the Mersey known collectively as the West Derby Hundred.

1207

The name Liverpool stems from Old English, lifer pol, meaning a muddy pool or creek, though no settlement emerge at Liverpool until after the Conquest.